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.The Sisterhood could not count the cost in any ordinaryway.The comptroller of the Bene Gesserit treasury did not deal merely inmonetary counters.Not for them the Solar or comparable currencies.Theybanked on their people, on food, on payments due sometimes for millennia,payments often in kind -- both materials and loyalties.Pay up, Duncan! We're calling in your note!This ship was not just a prison.He had considered several Mentat projections.Prime: it was a laboratory where Reverend Mothers sought a way to nullify a no-ship's ability to confuse human senses.A no-ship gameboard -- puzzle and warren.All to confine three prisoners? No.There had to be other reasons.The game had secret rules, some he could only guess.But he had found itreassuring when Sheeana entered into the spirit of it.I knew she would haveher own plans.Obvious when she began practicing Honored Matre techniques.Polishing my trainees!Sheeana wanted intimate information about Murbella and much more -- his memoriesof people he had known in his many lives, especially memories of the Tyrant.And I want information about the Bene Gesserit.The Sisterhood kept him in minimal activity.Frustrating him to increase Mentatabilities.He was not at the heart of that larger problem he sensed outside theship.Tantalizing fragments came to him when Odrade gave him glimpses of theirpredicament through her questions.Enough to offer new premises? Not without access to data that his consolerefused to display.It was his problem, too, damn them! He was in a box within their box.All ofthem trapped.Odrade had stood beside this console one afternoon a week ago and blandlyassured him the Sisterhood's data sources were "opened wide" to him.Rightthere she had stood, her back to the counter, leaning on it casually, armsfolded across her breast.Her resemblance to the adult Miles Teg was uncanny attimes.Even to that need (was it a compulsion?) to stand while talking.Shedisliked chairdogs, too.He knew he had an extremely loose comprehension of her motives and plans.Buthe didn't trust them.Not after Gammu.Decoy and bait.That was how they had used him.He was lucky not to have gonethe way of Dune -- a dead husk.Used up by the Bene Gesserit. When he fidgeted this way, Idaho preferred to slump into the chair at hisconsole.Sometimes, he sat here for hours, immobile, his mind trying toencompass complexities of the ship's powerful data resources.The system couldidentify any human in it.So it has automatic monitors.It had to know who wasspeaking, making demands, assuming temporary command.Flight circuits defy my attempts to break through the locks.Disconnected?That was what his guards said.But the ship's way of identifying who tapped thecircuits -- he knew his key lay there.Would Sheeana help? It was a dangerous gamble to trust her too much.Sometimeswhen she watched him at his console he was reminded of Odrade.Sheeana wasOdrade's student.That was a sobering memory.What was their interest in how he used Shipsystems? As if he needed to ask!During his third year here he had made the system hide data for him, doing thiswith his own keys.To thwart the prying comeyes, he hid his actions in plainsight.Obvious insertions for later retrieval but with an encrypted secondmessage.Easy for a Mentat and useful mostly as a trick, exploring thepotentials of Shipsystems.He had booby-trapped his data to a random dumpwithout hope of recovery.Bellonda suspected, but when she questioned him about it, he only smiled.I hide my history, Bell.My serial lives as a ghola -- all of them back to theoriginal non-ghola.Intimate things I remember about those experiences: adumping ground for poignant memories.Sitting now at the console, he experienced mixed feelings.Confinement galledhim.No matter the size and richness of his prison, it still was a prison.Hehad known for some time that he very likely could escape but Murbella and hisincreasing knowledge about their predicament held him.He felt as much aprisoner of his thoughts as of the elaborate system represented by guards andthis monstrous device.The no-ship was a device, of course.A tool.A way tomove unseen in a dangerous universe.A means of concealing yourself and yourintentions even from prescient searchers.With accumulated skills of many lifetimes, he looked on his surroundings througha screen of sophistication and naivete.Mentats cultivated naivete.Thinkingyou knew something was a sure way to blind yourself.It was not growing up thatslowly applied brakes to learning (Mentats were taught) but an accumulation of"things I know."New data sources the Sisterhood had opened to him (if he could rely on them)raised questions.How was opposition to Honored Matres organized in theScattering? Obviously there were groups (he hesitated to call them powers) whohunted Honored Matres the way Honored Matres hunted the Bene Gesserit.Killedthem, too, if you accepted Gammu evidence
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