Frank Herbert - The Godmakers

Orne thought about the young woman. She had been no taller than Polly, but slender and with golden-red hair caught under the sun hat in a swimmer’s chignon. She wasn’t beautiful—face too narrow and with suggestions of the father’s cragginess. The eyes were overlarge. But her mouth was full-lipped, chin strong. There had been an air of exquisite assurance about her. The total effect had been one of striking elegance—extremely feminine.

So that was his target—Diana Bullone. Where’d she gone in such a hurry?

Orne lifted his gaze to the landscape beyond the pool: wooded hills and, dimly on the horizon, a broken line of mountains. The Bullones lived in costly isolation despite their love of traditional simplicity… or perhaps because of it. Urban centers didn’t lend themselves to such old-time elegance. But here, centered in kilometers of wilderness and rugged, planned neglect of countryside, they could be what they wanted to be.

They could also be insulated from prying eyes.

Time to report in , Orne thought. He pressed the neck stud for his transceiver, got Stetson, brought him up to date.

“All right,” Stetson said. “Find the daughter. She fits the description of the woman you saw by the pool.”

“I know,” Orne said. He broke the connection, wondered at himself. He felt that he had become several people—one of them playing Stetson’s game, another off on personal interests, still another observing and disapproving. Through all of this, he felt that some essential core of himself had returned from death to become immersed in life—warm life teeming with beauty and movement. His body performed in one way, but an essential part of him filled with life and force, floated somewhere on a plane which interpreted death as only part of maturing.

It was a sensation of distortion and stretching. He fled from it, changing into light blue fatigues and letting himself out of the room into a curved yellow hallway. A touch to the timebeat repeater at his temple told him it was shortly before local noon. There was latitude for a bit of scouting before they called lunch. He knew from his brief tour of the house and its similarity to his childhood home that the hallway led into the main living salon. Public rooms and men’s quarters would be in this outside ring. Secluded family apartments and women’s quarters would occupy the inner circle.

Orne made his way to the salon. It was a long room built around two sections of the tetragon. Low divans occupied the space beneath the windows, some facing inward, some outward. Thick pile rugs formed a crazy patchwork of reds and browns throughout the room.

At the far end of the salon, a figure in blue fatigues much like his own stood bent over a metal stand. The figure straightened and a tinkle of music filled the room. Orne stood entranced at the familiar sound. It transported him in memory back to his childhood. The instrument was a kaithra. His own sisters had played it in a setting such as this one. He recognized the woman at the kaithra—the same red-gold hair, the same figure. It was the young woman he had seen beside the pool. She wielded two mallets in each hand to play the instrument which lay in a long dish of carved black wood on the metal stand, the strings stretched in six bands of five.

Orne, moody and caught in memories, moved up behind her, his footsteps muffled by the thick carpeting. The music possessed a curious rhythm. It suggested figures dancing wildly around firelight, rising, falling, stamping. She struck a final chord, muted the strings.

“That makes me homesick,” Orne said.

“Oh!” She whirled, gasped. “You startled me. I thought I was alone.”

“Sorry. I was just enjoying the music.”

She smiled. “I am Diana Bullone. You’re Lewis Orne.”

“Lew to all of your family, I hope,” he said. He enjoyed the warmth of her smile.

“Of course… Lew.” She put the mallets atop the kaithra’s strings. “This is a very old instrument. Most people find its music… well, rather strange. The ability to play it has been handed down for generations in mother’s family.”

“The kaithra,” Orne said. “My sisters play it. Been a long time since I’ve heard one.”

“Of course,” she said. “Your mother’s…” She stopped, appeared confused. “I have to get used to the fact that you’re… I mean, that we have a strange man around the house who isn’t exactly strange.”

Orne found himself grinning and aware of self-loathing from the inner observer part of his being.

In spite of the severely cut I-A fatigues and hair pulled back into a tight beretknot, Diana was a handsome woman. She possessed an electric presence. Orne reminded himself that this was Stetson’s prime suspect in the Nathian plot. Diana and Maddie? It was too odd a situation to accept casually. He could not afford to like this woman, but he did. She was the daughter of a family which had been kind to him, which was taking him into its own household as an honored guest. And how was such hospitality being repaid? By spying and prying.

He reminded himself that his first loyalty belonged to the I-A and the peace it represented. Another part of him, though, chimed in mockingly— peace such as that now prevailing on Hamal and Sheleb.

Rather lamely, he said: “I hope you get over the feeling that I’m a stranger.”

“I’m already over it,” she said. She stepped forward, linked arms with him, said: “If you feel up to it, I’ll give you the deluxe guided tour. This is a really weird house, but I love it.”

By nightfall, Orne had been reduced to a state of confusion. He found Diana exciting and fascinating, yet the most comfortable female companion he had ever met. She liked swimming, the bloodless hunting of paloika , the taste of ditar apples. She betrayed a disdainful attitude toward the older generation and I-A officialdom which she said she’d never before revealed to anyone.

They had laughed like fools over utter nonsense.

Orne returned to his room to change for dinner, stopped at the polawindow, which he tuned to clear transmission. The quick darkness of these latitudes had pulled an ebony blanket over the landscape. Distant cityglow painted a short yellow horizon off to the left. An orange halo remained on the peaks where Marak’s three moons would rise.

Am I falling in love with this woman? Orne asked himself.

Again, he sensed the fragmentation of his being—and this time felt the pull of his childhood training added to all of the other forces at war within him. The ritual training of Chargon came back to him with all of its mystery.

He thought: I am that. I am the consciousness of self which senses the Absolute and knows the Supreme Wisdom. I am the all-one impersonal I which is God.

It came straight out of the ancient rites which transferred kingly powers into religious terms, but he felt that the old concepts had taken on new meanings.

“I am God,” he whispered and he sensed forces writhing within him. Even as he spoke, he realized the words made no reference to his ego-identity-self. The I of this awareness was outside usual human concerns.

Without understanding its significance, Orne realized he had experienced a religious event .

He knew the Psi definitions taught in the I-A, but this experience shook him. He wanted to call Stetson, not to report but to talk out his own confusions about his role in this household. This thought made him acutely aware that Stetson or an aide had eavesdropped on his afternoon with Diana.