Unknown

I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand some day. I pray to your presence that this be so. Let the future remain uncertain for that is the canvas to receive our desires. Thus the human condition faces its perpetual tabula rasa. We possess no more than this moment where we dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create.

Behind the barrier of her desk, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam looked like a stranger, her face stony, her eyes black and merciless. “It is a death-alternative challenge.”

Instantly tense, Jessica stood before the Proctor Superior. A skinny girl with long, bronze hair, her face bore the seeds of genuine beauty that would soon flower. In back of her, the Acolyte who had delivered the Reverend Mother’s summons closed the heavy door. It locked with an ominous click.

“Yes, Reverend Mother?” Summoning all of her strength, Jessica kept her voice calm and still, envisioning a shallow pool of sound.

With a recent promotion, Mohiam had acquired her additional title as Proctor Superior of the Mother School on Wallach IX. Mohiam had her own private office, with antique books sealed in a clearplaz humidity case. On her wide desk sat three silver trays, each containing a geometric object: a green metal cube, a brilliant red pyramid, a golden sphere. Streaks of light shot from the surfaces of the objects, bouncing between them. For a long moment, Jessica stared at the hypnotic dance.

“You must listen to me carefully, girl, to every word, every inflection, every nuance. Your very life depends on this.”

Jessica lowered her eyebrows. Her green-eyed gaze shifted to the older woman’s tiny, birdlike eyes. Mohiam seemed nervous and fearful, but why?

“They are whatever you think they are.” Mohiam’s voice was as dry as a desert wind.

Synchronized, the objects rotated, so that each one revealed a dark, dark hole in its surface— a hole that corresponded in shape with the object itself. Jessica focused on the red pyramid, with its triangle-shaped opening.

The pyramid began to float toward her. Is this real, or all illusion? Startled, she opened her eyes wide and stared, transfixed.

The other two geometric shapes followed, until all three floated in front of Jessica’s face. Brilliant beams darted and arced, spectral streaks of color that made barely audible snappings and flowings.

Mohiam made her wait for many seconds, then said in an iron voice, “What is the first lesson? What have you been taught since you were a little girl?”

“Humans must never submit to animals, of course.” Jessica allowed a thread of anger and impatience to infiltrate her voice; Mohiam would know it was intentional. “After all you have trained in me, Proctor Superior, how can you suspect I am not human? When have I ever given you cause—”

“Silence. People are not always humans.” She came around the desk with the grace of a hunting cat and peered at Jessica through the sparkling light between the cube and the pyramid.

The girl felt a nervous tickle in her throat, but didn’t cough or speak. From experience with this instructor, Jessica knew something more was coming. And it did.

“Ages ago, during the Butlerian Jihad, most people were merely organic automatons, following the commands of thinking machines. Beaten down, they never questioned, never resisted, never thought. They were people, but had lost the spark that made them human. Still, a core of their kind resisted. They fought back, refused to give up, and ultimately prevailed. They alone remembered what it was to be human. We must never forget the lessons of those perilous times.”

The Reverend Mother’s robes rustled as she moved to one side, and suddenly her arm moved with an astonishing flash of speed, a blur of motion. Jessica saw a fingertip needle poised at her cheek, just below her right eye.

The girl did not flinch. Mohiam’s papery lips formed a smile. “You know of the gom jabbar, the high-handed enemy that kills only animals— those who behave out of instinct instead of discipline. This point is coated with meta-cyanide. The tiniest prick, and you die.”

The needle remained motionless, as if frozen in air. Mohiam leaned closer to her ear. “Of the three objects before you, one is pain, another is pleasure, and the third is eternity. The Sisterhood uses these things in a variety of ways and combinations. For this test, you are to select the one that is most profound to you and experience it, if you dare. There will be no other questions. This is the entire test.”

Without moving her head, Jessica shifted her gaze to study each item. Utilizing her Bene Gesserit powers of observation— and something more, the source of which she did not know— she sensed pleasure in the pyramid, pain in the box, eternity in the sphere. She had never undergone a test like this before, and had never heard of it, though she knew of the gom jabbar, the legendary needle developed in ancient times.

“This is the test,” Reverend Mother Mohiam said. “If you fail, I will scratch you.”

Like a vulture, the leathery proctor hovered beside the girl, watching every flicker of eye movement, every twitch. Mohiam could not let Jessica see her own anguish and dread, but she knew she had to carry out the test.

Gaius Helen Mohiam had trained Jessica since her youth, but the girl did not know her heritage, did not know her importance to the Sisterhood’s breeding program. She did not know that Mohiam was her mother.

Beside her, Jessica had turned ashen with concentration. Sweat sparkled on her smooth forehead. Mohiam studied the patterns on the geometric shapes, saw that the girl still had several levels to go within her mind. . . .

Her first daughter by the Baron had been weak and defective; following a terrible prophetic dream, Mohiam had killed the infant herself. It had been a true vision, Mohiam was certain; she saw her place at the culmination of the Sisterhood’s millennia-long breeding program. But she also learned through startling prescience that the Imperium would suffer great pain and death, with planets burned, a near-total genocide . . . if the breeding scheme were to go awry. If the wrong child were born in the next generation.

Mohiam had already murdered one of her daughters, and she was willing to sacrifice Jessica, too. If necessary. Better to kill her than to allow another terrible jihad to occur.

The poisoned silver needle hovered a hairbreadth from Jessica’s creamy skin. The girl trembled.

Jessica concentrated with all her might, staring ahead but seeing only words in her mind, the Litany Against Fear. I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

As she took a calming breath, she wondered, Which do I choose? The wrong decision and I die. She realized she had to go deeper, and in an epiphany, saw how the three geometric objects were positioned in the human journey: the pain of birth, the pleasure of a life well lived, the eternity of death. She was to select the most profound, Mohiam had said. But only one? How could she start anywhere but the beginning?

“I see you have chosen,” Mohiam said, watching the girl’s right hand lift.

Cautiously, Jessica inserted her hand into the green cube, through the hole in one side of it. Instantly, she felt her skin burning, scorching, her bones filling with lava. Her fingernails were flaking off one by one, peeled away by the ferocious heat. She had never in her life even imagined such agony. And it continued to build.

With a supreme effort, she resigned herself to living without her hand, blocked off the nerves. She would do it, if she must. But then logic imposed itself, even with the agony. She could not recall seeing stump-wristed Sisters in the halls of the Mother School. And if all Acolytes were required to face tests such as this . . .

A distant, analytical part of her brain realized that she did not smell cooking flesh, either, did not see wisps of gray smoke, did not hear the crackle and pop of sizzling fat in the meat of her hand.

Fighting for control of her nerves, Jessica shut off the pain. From her wrist to her elbow, she felt only cold numbness. Her hand no longer existed; the agony no longer existed. Deeper, deeper. Moments later, she had no physical form whatsoever, having separated herself entirely from her body.

The mist— a manifestation of Jessica’s awareness— floated into a hole of a different shape, the entrance to the red pyramid. Now a jolt of pleasure suffused her, intensely stimulating but so shocking that she could hardly bear it. She had gone from one extreme to another. She trembled, then flowed and surged, like the ascension of a tsunami on a vast sea. Higher and higher the great wave mounted, crested. . . .

But the mist of her awareness, after riding the top of a powerful wave, suddenly cascaded down it, tumbling away . . . falling. . . .

The images vanished, and Jessica felt the thin fabric shoes on her feet, a clammy, sweating sensation of skin against material, and the hardness of the floor beneath. Her right hand . . . She still couldn’t feel it, and couldn’t see it, either, or even a stump at the wrist, for only her eyes were able to move.

Glancing to the right, she saw the poisoned needle hovering at her cheek, the deadly gom jabbar with the golden sphere of eternity visible beyond. Mohiam held firm, and Jessica centered her vision on the sharp silver tip, the glinting central point of the universe poised like a distant star. A prick of the needle and Jessica would enter the sphere of eternity, in mind and body. There would be no return. The girl felt no pain or pleasure now, only a numbed stillness as she hovered on the precipice of a decision.

“Pain, pleasure, eternity . . . all interest me,” Jessica murmured at last, as if from a great distance, “for what is one without the others?”

Mohiam saw that the girl had passed the crisis, survived the test. An animal would not have been able to comprehend such intangibles. Jessica sagged, visibly shaken. The poisoned needle withdrew.

For Jessica, the ordeal was over quite suddenly. All of it had been imagined, the pain, the pleasure, the nothingness. All accomplished through Bene Gesserit mind-control, the tremendous ability of the Sisterhood to direct another person’s thoughts and actions. A test.

Had her hand really gone into the green cube? Had she become a mist? Intellectually, she didn’t think so. But when she flexed the fingers of her hand, they were stiff and sore.

Her robes smelling of musty perspiration, Mohiam trembled, then regained her composure. She gave Jessica the briefest hug, and then her demeanor became formal again.