Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [41]
And she carried the motion. Just barely.
Even our ship’s no-field cannot protect us from the prescience of Guild Navigators as they search the cosmos. Only the wild genes of an Atreides can completely veil the ship.
—THE MENTAT BELLONDA,
addressing a convocation of acolytes
H
is mind numb after the shouting match among the Bene Gesserits, Duncan Idaho went through a round of solo exercises on the practice floor. To sort out his thoughts, he felt a compulsion to go to this familiar place where he had spent so many enjoyable hours. With Murbella.
In attempting to exert supreme control over his muscles and nerves, he became more conscious of his failures. There were always reminders. Employing his Mentat abilities, he recognized when he missed certain advanced prana-bindu movements by the merest hair’s breadth; few observers would have noticed the errors, but he saw them. With the whole matter of the new gholas weighing heavily on him, he felt out of balance.
Again, he completed the ritualistic steps. Holding a short-sword, he tried to achieve the relaxed preparedness of prana-bindu, that inner calmness that would enable him to defend himself and strike with lightning speed. But his muscles stubbornly refused to comply with the impulses of his mind.
Fighting is a matter of life and death . . . not of mood. Gurney Halleck had taught him that.
Taking two deep breaths, Duncan closed his eyes and slipped into a mnemonic trance in which he arrayed the data involved with this dilemma. In his mind’s eye, he saw a long scratch on an adjacent wall that had previously escaped his attention. Odd that no one had repaired it in so many years . . . odder still that he had not noticed it in all that time.
Almost a decade and a half ago Murbella had slipped and fallen there during a knife-fighting practice with him—and very nearly died. When she’d gone down in slow motion, twisting her knife hand and falling in such a way that the blade would have penetrated her heart, Duncan had envisioned the full range of possible outcomes in his Mentat mind. He saw the many ways that she could die . . . and the few in which she could be saved. As she fell, he thrust a powerful kick at her, knocking the weapon away and scraping the wall.
A scratch on the wall, unnoticed and forgotten until now . . .
Only moments after that near tragedy, he and Murbella had made love there on the floor. It had been one of their most memorable coital collisions, with his Bene Gesserit–enhanced masculine abilities pitted against her Honored Matre sexual bonding techniques. Superhuman stud against amber-haired temptress.
Did she still think of him after nearly four years?
In his private cabin and in the common areas of the no-ship, Duncan continued to find reminders of his lost love. Before the escape he had been intent on making secret plans with Sheeana, hiding necessary items aboard the vessel, surreptitiously loading the volunteer pilgrims, equipment, supplies, and seven sandworms—keeping Duncan so busy that he had been able to forget Murbella for a while.
But immediately after the no-ship successfully tore away from the old couple and their clinging web, Duncan had too much time and too many opportunities to stumble upon previously unnoticed emotional land mines. He found a few of Murbella’s keepsakes, training garments, toiletry items. Though he was a Mentat and could not forget details, simply finding these leftovers of her presence had hit him hard, like memory time bombs, worse than the explosive mines that had once been rigged around the no-ship at Chapterhouse.
For his own sanity, Duncan had finally gathered every scrap, from rumpled exercise clothes caked with her dried sweat, to discarded towels she had used, to her favorite stylus. He had thrown them all into one of the no-ship’s unused small storage bins. The intact nullentropy field