Dune 2: Love and Betrayal

03 A Bene Gesserit Savior

Wallach 9 (Wallach IX)

Homeworld of the Bene Gesserit

In a deep spice-induced trance, the Reverend Mother Superior sits with her wrinkled aged eyelids softly closed, a few sparse eyelashes barely visible. Like a corpse, she is completely still, her pale thin lips locked tightly shut. To an observer, it seems she had stopped breathing completely, her last breath taken nearly thirty minutes ago. The air from that breath is tucked deep within her belly, slowly feeding her body, while allowing the lack of oxygen and increase in carbon dioxide to lift her to the deepest and highest state of relaxation.

When her lips finally crack open twenty minutes later, she does not gasp for air like one who had been holding their breath for as long as they could. Instead, she simply cracks her lips, letting the air flow in smoothly, effortlessly – even and controlled. Years of practice made the whole exercise an unconscious rhythm and brought her need for oxygen to an unimaginable low. Fifty minutes without a breath. (In 2023, the world record is 24 minutes, 37 seconds.) The ancients had taught that breath was life, but the Sisterhood knew the secret, that emptiness lifted one to forbidden realms, the flow state, where the visions lay.

Though they always denied they were a religious order, the Bene Gesserit Order, operated behind an almost impenetrable screen of ritual mysticism. An ancient school of mental and physical training; their training, symbolism, organization, and internal teaching methods were almost wholly religious.

Beginning as a band of sorceresses, they used tarot, meditation, breathing techniques, hallucinogens, drugs, and poisons to yield power, exercise control and wrench visions and past memories from the beyond. As it rose to power, the Sisterhood placed agents in the imperial court and Great Houses, where they trained noble females, prophesied, oversaw negotiations, mediated disputes, and performed the function of Truthsayer (lie detector). The Reverend Mother Superior was the leader of the Order, guiding those below her toward their best future.

In a dimly candle-lit room, she sits cross legged on a cushioned floor mat. Her black robe's hood hangs loosely over her head, with her white hair neatly tucked up into a tight black head covering. Not a hair is out of place or visible. Caught up in a five day trance, she walks between the world of the conscious and subconscious mind, where prescience is found, yielding up visions of the past. (Prescience = past knowledge or foreknowledge/future knowledge)

As she sits, sifting through the memories of Bene Gesserit Sisters before her, she glimpses back to a time over ten thousand years ago, when the ancient and adept organization of the Sisterhood had struggled to first give a special education to females. This training had given them a unique value in a male-dominated society that had returned to a kind of feudalism, led by male bloodlines. The war with the thinking machines had left behind a dystopian world, where men and women were turned into soldiers and survivalists, forever altering the value of human life.

She saw careful whispers. Alliances. Wise Reverend Mothers carefully making sacrifices for the future of humanity. Sisters mastering and controlling their physical bodies and choosing to bear only daughters, and no sons. Ten thousand years of careful breeding. Why? What was the goal of all this sacrifice? It was all done for the long-awaited Kwisatz Haderach - a super being - "the one who can be many places at once." A Messiah, a Christ figure, the Anointed One, coming upon this generation. ("Messiah" is the Aramaic/Hebrew word and "Christ" is the Greek word and both mean "anointed one.")

Time moves quickly on to the present with glimpses of The Now and flashes of figures and events. House Harkonnen. The Baron. Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Moheim. Young Feyd-Rautha, the handsome Harkonnen heir, the na-baron. The soon-to-be Emperor Feyd – if the Sisters' plans came to fulfillment – would finally bring the essential Harkonnen bloodline to the Imperial throne. (Feyd = pronounced "Fade"; Rau-tha) (Russian/Dutch: na-baron means the heir-to-be baron; after-the-fact baron)