They were passing a morgue, the strong smell of antiseptics even in the street. The arched doorway stood open.
"Who died?" Odrade asked, ignoring Bellonda's anxiety.
"A Proctor from Section Four and an orchard maintenance man," Tamalane said. Tam always knew.
Bellonda was furious at being ignored and made no attempt to hide it. "Will you two stick to the point?"
"What is the point?" Odrade asked. Very mild.
They emerged on the south terrace and stopped at the stone rail to look over the plantations - vineyards and orchards. The morning light had a dusty haze in it not at all like the mists created of moisture.
"You know the point!" Bell would not be deflected.
Odrade stared at the vista, pressing herself against the stones. The railing was frigid. That mist out there was a different color, she thought. Sunlight came through dust with a different reflective spectrum. More bounce and sharpness to the light. Absorbed in a different way. The nimbus was tighter. The blowing dust and sand crept into every crevice the way water did but the grating and rasping betrayed its source. The same with Bell's persistence. No lubrication.
"That's desert light," Odrade said, pointing.
"Stop avoiding me," Bellonda said.
Odrade chose not to answer. The dusty light was a classical thing, but not reassuring in the way of the elder painters and their misty mornings.
Tamalane came up beside Odrade. "Beautiful in its own way." The remote tone said she made Other Memory comparisons similar to Odrade's.
If that's how you were conditioned to look for beauty. But something deep within Odrade said this was not the beauty for which she longed.
In the shallow swales below them, where once there had been greenery, now there was dryness and a sense of the earth being gutted the way ancient Egyptians had prepared their dead - dried to essential matter, preserved for their Eternity. Desert as deathmaster, swaddling the dirt in nitron, embalming our beautiful planet with all of its jewels concealed.
Bellonda stood behind them, muttering and shaking her head, refusing to look at what their planet would become.
Odrade almost shuddered in a sudden thrust of simulflow. Memory flooded her: She felt herself searching Sietch Tabr's ruins, finding desert-embalmed bodies of spice pirates left where killers had dropped them.
What is Sieteh Tabr now? A molten flow solidified and without anything to mark its proud history. Honored Matres: killers of history.
"If you won't eliminate Idaho, then I must protest your using him as a Mentat."
Bell was such a fussy woman! Odrade noted that she was showing her age more than ever. Reading lenses on her nose even now. They magnified her eyes until she had the look of a great-orbed fish. Use of lenses and not one of the more subtle prostheses said something about her. She flaunted a reverse vanity that announced: "I am greater than the devices my failing senses require. "
Bellonda was definitely irritated by Mother Superior. "Why are you staring at me that way?"
Odrade, caught by abrupt awareness of a weakness in her Council, shifted her attention to Tamalane. Cartilage never stopped growing and this had enlarged Tam's ears, nose and chin. Some Reverend Mothers adjusted this by metabolism control or sought regular surgical correction. Tam would not bow to such vanity. "Here's what I am. Take it or leave it."
My advisors are too old. And I... I should be younger and stronger to have these problems on my shoulders. Oh, damn this for a lapse into self-pity!
Only one supreme danger: action against survival of the Sisterhood.
"Duncan is a superb Mentat!" Odrade spoke with all the force of her position. "But I use none of you beyond your capabilities."
Bellonda remained silent. She knew a Mentat's weaknesses.
Mentats! Odrade thought. They were like walking Archives but when you most needed answers they relapsed into questions.
"I don't need another Mentat," Odrade said. "I need an inventor!"
When Bellonda still did not speak, Odrade said: "I am freeing his mind, not his body."
"I insist on an analysis before you open all data sources to him!"
Considering Bellonda's usual stance, that was mild. But Odrade did not trust it. She detested those sessions - endless rehashing of Archival reports. Bellonda doted on them. Bellonda of Archival minutiae and boring excursions into irrelevant details! Who cared if Reverend Mother X preferred skimmed milk on her porridge?
Odrade turned her back on Bellonda and looked at the southern sky. Dust! We would sift more dust! Bellonda would be flanked by assistants. Odrade felt boredom just imagining it.
"No more analysis." Odrade spoke more sharply than she had intended.
"I do have a point of view." Bellonda sounded hurt.
Point of view? Are we no more than sensory windows on our universe, each with only a point of view?
Instincts and memories of all types... even Archives - none of these things spoke for themselves except by compelling intrusions. None carried weight until formulated in a living consciousness. But whoever produced the formulation tipped the scales. All order is arbitrary! Why this datum rather than some other? Any Reverend Mother knew events occurred in their own flux, their own relative environment. Why couldn't a Mentat Reverend Mother act from that knowledge?
"Do you refuse counsel?" That was Tamalane. Was she siding with Bell?
Chapter Nine
"When have I ever refused counsel?" Odrade let her outrage show. "I am refusing another of Bell's Archival merry-go-rounds."
Bellonda intruded. "Then, in reality -"
"Bell! Don't talk to me about reality!" Let her simmer in that! Reverend Mother and Mentat! There is no reality. Only our own order imposed on everything. A basic Bene Gesserit dictum.