Dune

Edric took this moment to pop a melange pill into his mouth. He ate the spice and breathed it and, no doubt, drank it, Scytale noted. Understandable, because the spice heightened a Steersman’s prescience, gave him the power to guide a Guild heighliner across space at translight speeds. With spice awareness he found that line of the ship’s future which avoided peril. Edric smelled another kind of peril now, but his crutch of prescience might not find it.

“I think it was a mistake for me to come here,” Irulan said.

The Reverend Mother turned, opened her eyes, closed them, a curiously reptilian gesture.

Scytale shifted his gaze from Irulan to the tank, inviting the Princess to share his viewpoint. She would, Scytale knew, see Edric as a repellent figure: the bold stare, those monstrous feet and hands moving softly in the gas, the smoky swirling of orange eddies around him. She would wonder about his sex habits, thinking how odd it would be to mate with such a one. Even the field-force generator which recreated for Edric the weightlessness of space would set him apart from her now.

“Princess,” Scytale said, “because of Edric here, your husband’s oracular sight cannot stumble upon certain incidents, including this one . . . presumably.”

“Presumably,” Irulan said.

Eyes closed, the Reverend Mother nodded. “The phenomenon of prescience is poorly understood even by its initiates,” she said.

“I am a full Guild Navigator and have the Power,” Edric said.

Again, the Reverend Mother opened her eyes. This time, she stared at the Face Dancer, eyes probing with that peculiar Bene Gesserit intensity. She was weighing minutiae.

“No, Reverend Mother,” Scytale murmured, “I am not as simple as I appeared.”

“We don’t understand this Power of second sight,” Irulan said. “There’s a point. Edric says my husband cannot see, know or predict what happens within the sphere of a Navigator’s influence. But how far does that influence extend?”

“There are people and things in our universe which I know only by their effects,” Edric said, his fish mouth held in a thin line. “I know they have been here . . . there . . . somewhere. As water creatures stir up the currents in their passage, so the prescient stir up Time. I have seen where your husband has been; never have I seen him nor the people who truly share his aims and loyalties. This is the concealment which an adept gives to those who are his.”

“Irulan is not yours,” Scytale said. And he looked sideways at the Princess.

“We all know why the conspiracy must be conducted only in my presence,” Edric said.

Using the voice mode for describing a machine, Irulan said: “You have your uses, apparently.”

She sees him now for what he is, Scytale thought. Good!

“The future is a thing to be shaped,” Scytale said. “Hold that thought, Princess.”

Irulan glanced at the Face Dancer.

“People who share Paul’s aims and loyalties,” she said. “Certain of his Fremen legionaries, then, wear his cloak. I have seen him prophesy for them, heard their cries of adulation for their Mahdi, their Muad’Dib.”

It has occurred to her, Scytale thought, that she is on trial here, that a judgment remains to be made which could preserve her or destroy her. She sees the trap we set for her.

Momentarily, Scytale’s gaze locked with that of the Reverend Mother and he experienced the odd realization that they had shared this thought about Irulan. The Bene Gesserit, of course, had briefed their Princess, primed her with the lie adroit. But the moment always came when a Bene Gesserit must trust her own training and instincts.

“Princess, I know what it is you most desire from the Emperor,” Edric said.

“Who does not know it?” Irulan asked.

“You wish to be the founding mother of the royal dynasty,” Edric said, as though he had not heard her. “Unless you join us, that will never happen. Take my oracular word on it. The Emperor married you for political reasons, but you’ll never share his bed.”

“So the oracle is also a voyeur,” Irulan sneered.

“The Emperor is more firmly wedded to his Fremen concubine than he is to you!” Edric snapped.

“And she gives him no heir,” Irulan said.

“Reason is the first victim of strong emotion,” Scytale murmured. He sensed the outpouring of Irulan’s anger, saw his admonition take effect.

“She gives him no heir,” Irulan said, her voice measuring out controlled calmness, “because I am secretly administering a contraceptive. Is that the sort of admission you wanted from me?”

“It’d not be a thing for the Emperor to discover,” Edric said, smiling.

“I have lies ready for him,” Irulan said. “He may have truthsense, but some lies are easier to believe than the truth.”

“You must make the choice, Princess,” Scytale said, “but understand what it is protects you.”

“Paul is fair with me,” she said. “I sit in his Council.”