"The masking system (the crystal continued) did not succeed with us. We have our own well-recorded Jewish heritage and a fund of Other Memory to tell us reasons for secrecy. We did not disturb the situation until I, Mother Superior during and after the battle of Corrin (Very old, indeed!), saw that our Sisterhood had need of a secret society, a group responsive to our requests for assistance."
Lucilla felt a surge of skepticism. Requests?
The long-ago Mother Superior had anticipated skepticism. "On occasion, we make demands they cannot avoid. But they make demands on us as well."
Lucilla felt immersed in the mystique of this underground society. It was more than ultra-secret. Her clumsy questions in Archives had elicited mostly rejections. "Jews? What's that? Oh, yes - an ancient sect. Look it up for yourself. We don't have time for idle religious research."
The crystal had more to impart: "Jews are amused and sometimes dismayed at what they interpret as our copying them. Our breeding records dominated by the female line to control the mating pattern are seen as Jewish. You are only a Jew if your mother was a Jew. "
The crystal came to its conclusion: "The Diaspora will be remembered. Keeping this secret involves our deepest honor."
Lucilla lifted the hood from her head.
"You are a very good choice for an extremely touchy assignment on Lampadas," Odrade had said, restoring the crystal to its hiding place.
That is the past and likely dead. Look where Odrade's "touchy assignment" has brought me!
From her vantage in the Gammu farmhouse, Lucilla noted a large produce carrier had entered the grounds. There was a bustle of activity below her. Workers came from all sides to meet the big carrier with towbins of vegetables. She smelled the pungent juices from the cut stems of marrows.
Lucilla did not move from the window. Her host had supplied her with local garments - a long gown of drab gray everwear and a bright blue headscarf to confine her sandy hair. It was important to do nothing calling undue attention to herself. She had seen other women pause to watch the farm work. Her presence here could be taken as curiosity.
It was a large carrier, its suspensors laboring under the load of produce already piled in its articulated sections. The operator stood in a transparent house at the front, hands on the steering lever, eyes straight ahead. His legs were spread wide and he leaned into the web of sloping supports, touching the power bar with his left hip. He was a large man, face dark and deeply wrinkled, hair laced with gray. His body was an extension of the machinery - guiding ponderous movement. He flicked his gaze up to Lucilla as he passed, then back to the track into the wide loading area defined by buildings below her.
Built into his machine, she thought. That said something about the way humans were fitted to the things they did. Lucilla sensed a weakening force in this thought. If you fitted yourself too tightly to one thing, other abilities atrophied. We become what we do.
She pictured herself suddenly as another operator in some great machine, no different from that man in the carrier.
The big machine trundled past her out of the yard, its operator not sparing her another glance. He had seen her once. Why look twice?
Her hosts had made a wise choice in this hiding place, she thought. A sparsely populated area with trustworthy workers in the immediate vicinity and little curiosity among the people who passed. Hard work dulled curiosity. She had noted the character of the area. when she was brought here. Evening then and people already trudging toward their homes. You could measure the urban density of an area by when work stopped. Early to bed and you were in a loosely-packed region. Night activity said people remained restless, twitchy with inner awareness of others active and vibrating too near.
What has brought me to this introspective state?
Early in the Sisterhood's first retreat, before the worst onslaughts of the Honored Matres, Lucilla had experienced difficulty coming to grips with belief that "someone out there is hunting us with intent to kill."
Pogrom! That was what the Rabbi had called it before going off that morning "to see what I can do for you."
She knew the Rabbi had chosen his word from long and bitter memory, but not since her first experience of Gammu before this pogrom had Lucilla felt such confinement to circumstances she could not control.
I was a fugitive then, too.
The Sisterhood's present situation bore similarities to what they had suffered under the Tyrant, except that the God Emperor obviously (in retrospect) never intended to exterminate the Bene Gesserit, only to rule them. And he certainly ruled!
Where is that damned Rabbi?
He was a large, intense man with old-fashioned spectacles. A broad face browned by much sunlight. Few wrinkles despite the age she could read in his voice and movements. The spectacles focused attention on deeply set brown eyes that watched her with peculiar intensity.
"Honored Matres," he had said (right here in this bare-walled upper room) when she explained her predicament. "Oh, my! That is difficult."
Lucilla had expected that response and, what was more, she could see he knew it.
"There is a Guild Navigator on Gammu helping the search for you," he said. "It is one of the Edrics, very powerful, I am told."
"I have Siona blood. He cannot see me."
"Nor me nor any of my people and for the same reason. We Jews adjust to many necessities, you know."
"This Edric is a gesture," she said. "He can do little."
"But they have brought him. I'm afraid there is no way we can get you safely off the planet."
"Then what can we do?"
"We will see. My people are not entirely helpless, you understand?"
She recognized sincerity and concern for her. He spoke quietly of resisting the sexual blandishments of Honored Matres, "doing it unobtrusively so as not to arouse them."
"I will go whisper in a few ears," he said.
She felt oddly restored by this. There often was something coldly remote and cruel about falling into the hands of the medical professions. She reassured herself with the knowledge that Suks were conditioned to be alert to your needs, compassionate and supportive. (All of those things that can fall by the wayside in emergencies.) She bent her efforts to restoring calm, focusing on the personal mantra she had gained in solo death education.
If I am to die, I must pass along a transcendental lesson. I must leave with serenity.
That helped but still she felt a trembling. The Rabbi had been gone too long. Something was wrong.
Was I right to trust him?
Despite a growing sense of doom, Lucilla forced herself to practice Bene Gesserit naivete as she reviewed her encounter with the Rabbi. Her Proctors had called this "the innocence that goes naturally with inexperience, a condition often confused with ignorance." Into this naivete all things flowed. It was close to Mentat performance. Information entered without prejudgment. "You are a mirror upon which the universe is reflected. That reflection is all you experience. Images bounce from your senses. Hypotheses arise. Important even when wrong. Here is the exceptional case where more than one wrong can produce dependable decisions."
"We are your willing servants," the Rabbi had said.
That was guaranteed to alert a Reverend Mother.
The explanations of Odrade's crystal felt suddenly inadequate. It's almost always profit. She accepted this as cynical but from vast experience. Attempts to weed it out of human behavior always broke up on the rocks of application. Socializing and communistic systems only changed the counters that measured profits. Enormous managerial bureaucracies - the counter was power.
Lucilla warned herself that the manifestations were always the same. Look at this Rabbi's extensive farm! Retirement retreat for a Suk? She had seen something of what lay behind the establishment: servants, richer quarters. And there must be more. No matter the system it was always the same: the best foods, beautiful lovers, unrestricted travel, magnificent holiday accommodations.