Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [100]
As she stood in the middle of the wasteland, the sand continued to trickle through the ethereal hourglass. Would a sandworm come, if this landscape was meant to replicate the planet Dune?
She saw a distant figure on one of the dune tops, a woman moving over the sand with a well-practiced and intentionally uneven gait, as if she had spent all her life doing it. The stranger glided down the dune face toward Sheeana, then disappeared in a valley between the undulating dunes. Moments later she reappeared on top of a closer mound of sand. The woman went down one dune and up another, coming closer to her, growing larger. In the foreground, sand continued to whisper through the bottleneck of the invisible hourglass in the air.
Finally, the woman crested the last dune and hurried down the visible face directly toward Sheeana. Oddly, she left no footprints and spilled no loose sand.
Now Sheeana could see that she wore an old-style stillsuit, with a black hood. Even so, a few strands of gray hair drifted around a face so dry and leathery it looked like driftwood. Her rheumy eyes were the deepest blue-within-blue Sheeana had ever seen. She must have consumed a great deal of spice for many years; she seemed incredibly ancient.
“I speak with the voice of the multitude,” the crone said in an eerie, echoing voice. Her teeth were yellow and crooked. “You know what I mean?”
“The multitude of Other Memory? You speak for dead Sisters?”
“I speak for eternity, for all who have lived and all who are yet unborn. I am Sayyadina Ramallo. Long ago, Chani and I administered the Water of Life to Lady Jessica, the mother of Muad’Dib.” She pointed a gnarled finger toward a distant formation of rocks. “It was over there. And now you have brought them all back.”
Ramallo. Sheeana knew of the old woman, a key figure in the epic of recorded history. In sending Jessica through the Agony in a Fremen sietch, not realizing she was pregnant, Ramallo had unknowingly changed the fetus inside. The daughter, Alia, had been called an Abomination.
The Sayyadina seemed remote, a mere mouthpiece for the turmoil in Other Memory. “Hear my words, Sheeana, and heed them closely. Be careful what you create. You bring back too much, too quickly. A simple thing can have great repercussions.”
“You want me to stop the ghola project altogether?” On the no-ship, Alia’s cells were also among those preserved in the Tleilaxu Master’s nullentropy capsule. Ramallo in Other Memory must have seen the infamous Abomination as her greatest, most tragic error, though the old Sayyadina had not lived to know Alia.
“You want me to avoid Alia? One of the other gholas?” Alia was to be the next ghola child created, the first of a new batch that included Serena Butler, Xavier Harkonnen, Duke Leto Atreides, and many others.
“Caution, child. Heed my words. Take time. Proceed cautiously over dangerous terrain.”
Sheeana moved closer to the figure. “But what does that mean? Should we wait a year? Five years?”
Just then the sand in the imaginary hourglass ran out, and old Ramallo faded to a ghostly image that lingered like a dust devil before disappearing entirely. With her, the landscape of ancient Dune dissolved as well, and Sheeana found herself in her bedchamber again, staring into the shadows with a sense of uneasiness, and no clear answers.
Like minds do not always blend. They can be an explosive mixture.
—MOTHER COMMANDER MURBELLA
F
or more than thirteen years now, from the time she had arrived with her Honored Matre conquerors intending to rule Chapterhouse, Doria had played the game of getting along with the witches. By now, she was quite good at it. Doria had tried to tolerate their ways and learn from them in order to turn such information against the Bene Gesserit. Gradually, she had accepted some compromises in her thought patterns, but she could not alter her fundamental core.
Out of grudging respect for the Mother Commander, she struggled to do her best with the spice operations, as she