“We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”

He lifted his right hand, willing the memory of the pain. “And that’s all there is to it—pain?”

“I observed you in pain, lad. Pain’s merely the axis of the test. Your mother’s told you about our ways of observing. I see the signs of her teaching in you. Our test is crisis and observation.”

He heard the confirmation in her voice, said: “It’s truth!”

She stared at him. He senses truth! Could he be the one? Could he truly be the one? She extinguished the excitement, reminding herself: “Hope clouds observation.”

“You know when people believe what they say,” she said.

“I know it.”

The harmonics of ability confirmed by repeated test were in his voice. She heard them, said: “Perhaps you are the Kwisatz Haderach. Sit down, little brother, here at my feet.”

“I prefer to stand.”

“Your mother sat at my feet once.”

“I’m not my mother.”

“You hate us a little, eh?” She looked toward the door, called out: “Jessica!”

The door flew open and Jessica stood there staring hard-eyed into the room. Hardness melted from her as she saw Paul. She managed a faint smile.

“Jessica, have you ever stopped hating me?” the old woman asked.

“I both love and hate you,” Jessica said. “The hate—that’s from pains I must never forget. The love—that’s….”

“Just the basic fact,” the old woman said, but her voice was gentle. “You may come in now, but remain silent. Close that door and mind it that no one interrupts us.”

Jessica stepped into the room, closed the door and stood with her back to it. My son lives, she thought. My son lives and is… human. I knew he was … but … he lives. Now, I can go on living. The door felt hard and real against her back. Everything in the room was immediate and pressing against her senses.

My son lives.

“Why do you test for humans?” he asked.

“To set you free.”

“Free?”

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

“ ‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’ ” Paul quoted.

“Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible,” she said. “But what the O.C. Bible should’ve said is: ‘Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.’ Have you studied the Mentat in your service?”

“I’ve studied with Thufir Hawat.”

“The Great Revolt took away a crutch,” she said. “It forced human minds to develop. Schools were started to train human talents.”

“Bene Gesserit schools?”

She nodded. “We have two chief survivors of those ancient schools: the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild. The Guild, so we think, emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs another function.”

“Politics,” he said.

“Kull wahad!” the old woman said. She sent a hard glance at Jessica.

“I’ve not told him, Your Reverence,” Jessica said.

The Reverend Mother returned her attention to Paul. “You did that on remarkably few clues,” she said. “Politics indeed. The original Bene Gesserit school was directed by those who saw the need of a thread of continuity in human affairs. They saw there could be no such continuity without separating human stock from animal stock—for breeding purposes.”

The old woman’s words abruptly lost their special sharpness for Paul. He felt an offense against what his mother called his instinct for rightness. It wasn’t that Reverend Mother lied to him. She obviously believed what she said. It was something deeper, something tied to his terrible purpose.

He said: “But my mother tells me many Bene Gesserit of the schools don’t know their ancestry.”

“The genetic lines are always in our records,” she said. “Your mother knows that either she’s of Bene Gesserit descent or her stock was acceptable in itself.”

“Then why couldn’t she know who her parents are?”

“Some do…. Many don’t. We might, for example, have wanted to breed her to a close relative to set up a dominant in some genetic trait. We have many reasons.”

Again, Paul felt the offense against rightness. He said: “You take a lot on yourselves.”

The Reverend Mother stared at him, wondering: Did I hear criticism in his voice? “We carry a heavy burden,” she said.

Paul felt himself coming more and more out of the shock of the test. He leveled a measuring stare at her, said: “You say maybe I’m the … Kwisatz Haderach. What’s that, a human gom jabbar?”

“Paul,” Jessica said. “You mustn’t take that tone with—”

“I’ll handle this, Jessica,” the old woman said. “Now, lad, do you know about the Truthsayer drug?”

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