Heretics of Dune

Composing those words under Taraza's watchful guidance opened a flaw within me.

Could that have been Taraza's purpose: to make Odrade vulnerable? How could Taraza have known what would be found here on Rakis? The Mother Superior not only displayed no prescient abilities, she tended to avoid this talent in others. On the rare occasions when Taraza had demanded such a performance of Odrade herself, the reluctance had been obvious to the trained eye of a Sister.

Yet she made me vulnerable.

Had it been an accident?

Odrade sank into a swift recital of the Litany Against Fear, only a few eyeblinks but in that time Waff visibly came to a decision.

"You would force it upon us," he said. "But you do not know what powers we have reserved for such a moment." He lifted his sleeves to show where the dart throwers had been. "These were but paltry toys by comparison with our real weapons."

"The Sisterhood has never doubted this," Odrade said.

"Is it to be violent conflict between us?" he asked.

"It is your choice to make," she said.

"Why do you court violence?"

"There are those who would love to see Bene Gesserit and Bene Tleilax at each other's throats," Odrade said. "Our enemies would enjoy stepping in to pick up the pieces after we had weakened ourselves sufficiently."

"You state the argument for agreement but you give my people no room to negotiate! Perhaps your Mother Superior gave you no authority to negotiate!"

How tempting it was to pass it all back into Taraza's hands, just as Taraza wanted. Odrade glanced at the guardian Sisters. The two faces were masks betraying nothing. What did they really know? Would they realize if she went against Taraza's orders?

"Do you have such authority?" Waff persisted.

Noble purpose, Odrade thought. Surely, the Tyrant's Golden Path demonstrated at least one quality of such purpose.

Odrade decided on a creative truth. "I have such authority," she said. Her own words made it true. Having taken the authority, she made it impossible for Taraza to deny it. Odrade knew, though, that her own words committed her to a course sharply divergent from the sequential steps of Taraza's design.

Independent action. The very thing she had desired of Albertus.

But I am on the scene and know what is needed.

Odrade glanced at the guardian Sisters. "Remain here, please, and see that we are not disturbed." To Waff, she said: "We might as well be comfortable." She indicated two chairdogs set at right angles to each other across the room.

Odrade waited until they were seated before resuming the conversation. "We require a degree of candor between us that diplomacy seldom allows. Too much hangs in the balance for us to engage in shallow evasions."

Waff looked at her strangely. He said: "We know there is dissension in your highest councils. Subtle overtures have been made to us. Is this part of..."

"I am loyal to the Sisterhood," she said. "Even those who approached you had no other loyalty."

"Is this another trick of -"

"No tricks!"

"With the Bene Gesserit there are always tricks," he accused.

"What is it you fear from us? Name it."

"Perhaps I have learned too much from you for you to allow me to go on living."

"Could I not say the same of you?" she asked. "Who else knows of our secret affinity? This is no powindah female talking to you here!"

She had ventured the word with some trepidation, but the effect could not have been more revealing. Waff was visibly shaken. He was a long minute recovering. Doubts remained, though, because she had planted them in him.

"What do words prove?" he asked. "You might still take the things you have learned from me and leave my people nothing. You still hold the whip over us."

"I carry no weapons in my sleeves," Odrade said.

"But in your mind is knowledge that could ruin us!" He glanced back at the guardian Sisters.

"They are part of my arsenal," Odrade agreed. "Shall I send them away?"

"And in their minds everything they have heard here," he said. He returned his wary gaze to Odrade. "Better if you all sent your memories away!"

Odrade pitched her voice in its most reasonable tones. "What would we gain by exposing your missionary zeal before you are ready to move? Would it serve us to blacken your reputation by revealing where you have placed your new Face Dancers? Oh, yes, we know about Ix and the Fish Speakers. Once we had studied your new ones, we went searching for them."

"You see!" His voice was dangerously edged.

"I see no other way to prove our affinity than to reveal something equally damaging about ourselves," Odrade said.

Waff was speechless.

"We would plant the worms of the Prophet on uncounted planets of the Scattering," she said. "What would the Rakian priesthood say and do if you revealed that?"

The guardian Sisters looked at her with thinly masked amusement. They thought she was lying.

"I have no guards with me," Waff said. "When only one person knows a dangerous thing, how easy it is to gain that person's eternal silence."

She lifted her empty sleeves.

He looked at the guardian Sisters.