Dune

Don’t march in the streets with others who share your prejudices. Loud shouts are often the easiest to ignore. “I mean, look at them out there shouting their fool heads off! You want to make common cause with them?”

I told you, Murbella: Now judge for yourself. “To create change you find leverage points and move them. Beware blind alleys. Offers of high positions are a common distraction paraded before marchers. Leverage points are not all in high office. They are often at economic or communications centers and unless you know this, high office is useless. Even lieutenants can alter our course. Not by changing reports but by burying unwanted orders. Bell sits on orders until she believes them ineffective. I give her orders sometimes for this purpose: so she can play her delaying game. She knows it and yet she plays her game anyway. Know this, Murbella! And after we Share, study my performance with great care.”

Harmony had been achieved but at a cost. Odrade signaled that Convocation was ended, knowing well that all questions had not been answered nor even asked. But the unasked questions would come filtering through Bell where they would get the most appropriate treatment.

Alert ones among the Sisters would not ask. They already saw her plan.

As she left the Great Common Room, Odrade felt herself accept full commitment for choices she had made, recognizing previous hesitancy for the first time. There were regrets, but only Murbella and Sheeana might know them.

Walking behind Bellonda, Odrade thought about the places I will never go, the things I will never see except as a reflection in the life of another.

It was a form of nostalgia that centered on the Scatterings and this eased her pain. There was just too much for one person to see out there. Even the Bene Gesserit with its accumulated memories could never hope to catch up with all of it, not with every last interesting detail. It was back to grand designs. The Big Picture, the Mainstream. The specialties of my Sisterhood. Here were essentials Mentats employed: patterns, movements of currents and what those currents carried, where they were going. Consequences. Not maps but the flowings.

At least, I have preserved key elements of our jury-monitored democracy in original form. They may thank me for that one day.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

—THE CODA

“Who expected the air machinery to break down?”

The Rabbi asked his question of no one in particular. He sat on a low bench, a scroll clutched to his breast. The scroll had been reinforced by modern artifice but it still was old and fragile. He was not sure of the time. Midmorning probably. They had eaten not long ago food that could be described as breakfast.

“I expected it.”

He appeared to be addressing the scroll. “Passover has come and gone and our door was locked.”

Rebecca came to stand over him. “Please, Rabbi. How does this help Joshua at his labors?”

“We have not been abandoned,” the Rabbi told his scroll. “It is we who have hidden ourselves away. When we cannot be found by strangers, where would anyone look who might help us?”

He peered up abruptly at Rebecca, owlish behind his glasses. “Have you brought evil to us, Rebecca?”

She knew his meaning. “Outsiders always think there’s something nefarious about the Bene Gesserit,” she said.

“So now I, your Rabbi, am Outsider!”

“You estrange yourself, Rabbi. I speak from the viewpoint of the Sisterhood you made me help. What they do is often boring. Repetitious but not evil.”

“I made you help? Yes, I did that. Forgive me, Rebecca. If evil joins us, I have done it.”

“Rabbi! Stop this. They are an extended clan. And still, they keep a touchy individualism. Does an extended clan mean nothing to you? Does my dignity offend you?”