With accumulated skills of many lifetimes, he looked on his surroundings through a screen of sophistication and naivete. Mentats cultivated naivete. Thinking you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself. It was not growing up that slowly applied brakes to learning (Mentats were taught) but an accumulation of "things I know."
New data sources the Sisterhood had opened to him (if he could rely on them) raised questions. How was opposition to Honored Matres organized in the Scattering? Obviously there were groups (he hesitated to call them powers) who hunted Honored Matres the way Honored Matres hunted the Bene Gesserit. Killed them, too, if you accepted Gammu evidence.
Futars and Handlers? He made a Mentat Projection: A Tleilaxu offshoot in the first Scattering had engaged in genetic manipulation. Those two he saw in his vision: were they the ones who created Futars? Could that couple be Face Dancers? Independent of Tleilaxu Masters? All was not singular in the Scattering.
Dammit! He needed access to more data, to potent sources. His present sources were not even remotely adequate. A tool of limited purpose, his console could be adapted to larger requirements but his adaptations limped. He needed to stride out as a Mentat!
I've been hobbled and that's a mistake. Doesn't Odrade trust me? She's an Atreides, damn her! She knows what I owe her family.
More than one lifetime and the debt never paid!
He knew he was fidgeting. Abruptly, his mind locked on that. Mentat fidgeting! A signal that he stood poised at the edge of breakthrough. A Prime Projection! Something they had not told him about Teg?
Questions! There were unasked questions lashing at him.
I need perspective! Not necessarily a matter of distance. You could gain perspective from within if your questions carried few distortions.
He sensed that somewhere in Bene Gesserit experiences (perhaps even in Bell's jealously guarded Archives) lay missing pieces. Bell should appreciate this! A fellow Mentat must know the excitement of this moment. His thoughts were like tesserae, most of the pieces at hand and ready to fit into a mosaic. It was not a matter of solutions.
He could hear his first Mentat teacher, the words rumbling in his mind: "Assemble your questions in counterpoise and toss your temporary data onto one side of the scales or the other. Solutions unbalance any situation. Imbalances reveal what you seek."
Yes! Achieving imbalances with sensitized questions was a Mentat's juggling act.
Something Murbella had said the night before - what? They had been in her bed. He recalled seeing the time projected on the ceiling: 9:47. And he had thought: That projection takes energy.
He could almost feel the flow of the ship's power, this giant enclosure cut out of Time. Frictionless machinery to create a mimetic presence no instrument could distinguish from natural background. Except for now when it was on standby, shielded not from eyes but from prescience.
Murbella beside him: another kind of power, both aware of the force trying to pull them together. The energy it took to suppress that mutual magnetism! Sexual attraction building and building and building.
Murbella talking. Yes, that was it. Oddly self-analytic. She approached her own life with a new maturity, a Bene Gesserit-heightened awareness and confidence that something of great strength grew in her.
Every time he recognized this Bene Gesserit change, he felt sad.
Nearer the day of our parting.
But Murbella was talking. "She (Odrade was often 'she') keeps asking me to assess my love for you."
Remembering this, Idaho allowed it to replay.
"She has tried the same approach with me."
"What do you say?"
"Odi et amo. Excrucior."
She lifted herself on one elbow and looked down at him. "What language is that?"
"A very old one Leto had me learn once."
"Translate." Peremptory. Her old Honored Matre self.
" 'I hate her and I love her. And I am racked.' "
"Do you really hate me?" Unbelieving.
"What I hate is being tied this way, not the master of my self."
"Would you leave me if you could?"
"I want the decision to recur moment by moment. I want control of it."
"It's a game where one of the pieces can't be moved."
There it was! Her words.
Remembering, Idaho felt no elation but as though his eyes had suddenly been opened after a long sleep. A game where one of the pieces can't be moved. Game. His view of the no-ship and what the Sisterhood did here.
There was more to the exchange.
"The ship is our own special school," Murbella said.
He could only agree. The Sisterhood reinforced his Mentat capacities to screen data and display what had not gone through. He sensed where this might lead and felt leaden fear.
"You clear the nerve passages. You block off distractions and useless mind-wanderings."
You redirected your responses into that dangerous mode every Mentat was warned to avoid. "You can lose yourself there."
Students were taken to see human vegetables, "failed Mentats," kept alive to demonstrate the peril.
How tempting, though. You could sense the power in that mode. Nothing hidden. All things known.
In the midst of that fear, Murbella turning toward him on the bed, he felt the sexual tensions become almost explosive.
Not yet. Not yet!
One of them had said something else. What? He had been thinking about the limits of logic as a tool to expose the Sisterhood's motives.
"Do you often try to analyze them?" Murbella asked.
Uncanny how she did that, addressing his unspoken thoughts. She denied she read minds. "I just read you, ghola mine. You are mine, you know."