Unknown

Before us, all methods of learning were tainted by instinct. Before us, instinct-ridden researchers possessed a limited attention span— often no longer than a single lifetime. Projects stretching across fifty or more generations never occurred to them. The concept of total muscle/nerve training had not entered their awareness. We learned how to learn.

Is this truly a special child? The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam watched the perfectly proportioned girl perform prana-bindu muscular-nervature exercises on the hardwood floor of the Mother School’s training module.

Recently returned from the abortive banquet on Arrakis, Mohiam tried to look at her student with impartiality, suppressing the truth. Jessica. My own daughter . . . The girl must never know her heritage, must never suspect. Even on the secret Bene Gesserit breeding charts, Mohiam was not identified by her Sisterhood-adopted name, but by her birth name of “Tanidia Nerus.”

Twelve-year-old Jessica stood poised, arms at her sides, trying to relax herself, trying to arrest the movement of every muscle in her body. Gripping an imaginary blade in her right hand, she stared straight ahead at a chimerical opponent. She summoned untapped depths of inner peace and concentration.

But Mohiam’s sharp eye noted the barely discernible twitches in Jessica’s calf muscles, around her neck, over one eyebrow. This one would need more practice in order to perfect the techniques, but the child had made excellent progress and showed great promise. Jessica was blessed with a supreme patience, an ability to calm herself and listen to what she was told.

Jessica feinted to the left, floated, whirled— then stiffened to become a sudden statue again. Her eyes, while looking at Mohiam, did not see her taskmistress and mentor.

The stern Reverend Mother entered the training module, stared into the girl’s clear green eyes, and saw an emptiness there, like the gaze of a corpse. Jessica was gone, lost among her nerve and muscle fibers.

Mohiam dampened a finger and placed it in front of the girl’s nose. She felt only the faintest stirring of air. The budding breasts on the slender torso barely moved. Jessica was close to a complete bindu suspension . . . but not quite.

In the Sisterhood, only total perfection was good enough. As Jessica’s instructor, Mohiam would go over the ancient routines again and again, reviewing the steps that must be followed.

The Reverend Mother pulled back, studying Jessica but not rousing her. In the girl’s oval face, she tried to identify her own features, or those of the father, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen: The long neck and small nose reflected Mohiam’s genetics, but the widow’s peak at the hairline, the wide mouth, generous lips, and clear skin derived from the Baron . . . back when he’d been healthy and attractive. Jessica’s widely set green eyes and hair the color of polished bronze came from more distant latencies.

If you only knew. Mohiam recalled what she’d been told of the Bene Gesserit plan. Jessica’s own daughter, when grown to womanhood, was destined to give birth to the Kwisatz Haderach— the culmination of millennia of careful breeding. Mohiam looked into the girl’s face, searching for any twitch, any hint of grand historical import. You are not ready to discover this yet.

Jessica began to speak, mouthing word-shapes as she recited a mantra as ancient as the Bene Gesserit School itself: “Each attacker is a feather drifting on an infinite path. As the feather approaches, it is diverted and removed. My response is a puff of air that blows the feather away.”

Mohiam stepped back as her daughter snapped into a blur of motion, attempting to float through reflex moves. But Jessica still struggled to force her muscles to flow silently and smoothly, when she should have allowed them to do so.

The girl’s movements were better than before, more focused and precise. Jessica’s recent progress had been impressive, as if she’d experienced a mind-clarifying epiphany that lifted her to the next level. However, Mohiam still detected too much youthful energy and unharnessed intensity.

This girl was the product of a vicious rape by Baron Harkonnen, after the Sisterhood had blackmailed him into providing them with a daughter. Mohiam had exacted her revenge during the sexual attack, controlling her internal body chemistry in the Bene Gesserit way, inflicting him with a painful, debilitating disease. Such a delightfully slow torture. As his ailment progressed, the Baron had relied on a cane for the past Standard Year. At the Fenrings’ banquet, she’d been sorely tempted to tell the gross man what she’d done to him.

But if Mohiam had told him, there would have been another act of violence in the Dining Hall of the Residency at Arrakeen, far worse than the squabble between the Ecazi and Grumman ambassadors. She might even have found it necessary to kill the Baron with her deadly fighting skills. Jessica herself, despite her limited training, could have dispatched the man— her own father— quickly and easily.

Hearing a whir of machinery, Mohiam watched a life-size doll emerge from the floor. The next phase of the routine. In a blur the girl whirled and decapitated it with a single slashing kick.

“Still, I am proud of what you have accomplished.” Mohiam spoke in an uncharacteristically gentle tone, one that her superiors would not condone, had they heard it. Love, in any form, was prohibited.