"Frank Herbert - Dune 2 - Dune Messiah (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

wondering, Princess, if this was why you came all those parsecs, risked so much?"
She nodded agreement.
"Was it to bandy platitudes with a humanoid fish or dispute with a fat Tleilaxu Face Dancer?"
Scytale asked.
She stepped away from Edric's tank, shaking her head in annoyance at the thick odor of
melange.
Edric took this moment to pop a melange pill into his mouth. He ate the spice and breathed it
and, no doubt, drank it, Scytale noted. Understandable, because the spice heightened a Steersman's
prescience, gave him the power to guide a Guild heighliner across space at translight speeds. With
spice awareness he found that line of the ship's future which avoided peril. Edric smelled another
kind of peril now, but his crutch of prescience might not find it.
"I think it was a mistake for me to come here," Irulan said.


file:///F|/rah/Herbert,%20Frank/Dune%202%20-%20Dune%20Messiah.txt (4 of 102) [1/14/03 7:40:57 PM]
 file:///F|/rah/Herbert,%20Frank/Dune%202%20-%20Dune%20Messiah.txt

The Reverend Mother turned, opened her eyes, closed them, a curiously reptilian gesture.
Scytale shifted his gaze from Irulan to the tank, inviting the Princess to share his
viewpoint. She would, Scytale knew, see Edric as a repellent figure: the bold stare, those
monstrous feet and hands moving softly in the gas, the smoky swirling of orange eddies around him.
She would wonder about his sex habits, thinking how odd it would be to mate with such a one. Even
the field-force generator which recreated for Edric the weightlessness of space would set him
apart from her now.
"Princess," Scytale said, "because of Edric here, your husband's oracular sight cannot stumble
upon certain incidents, including this one . . . presumably."
"Presumably," Irulan said.
Eyes closed, the Reverend Mother nodded. "The phenomenon of prescience is poorly understood
even by its initiates," she said.
"I am a full Guild Navigator and have the Power," Edric said.
Again, the Reverend Mother opened her eyes. This time, she stared at the Face Dancer, eyes
probing with that peculiar Bene Gesserit intensity. She was weighing minutiae.
"No, Reverend Mother," Scytale murmured, "I am not as simple as I appeared."
"We don't understand this Power of second sight," Irulan said. "There's a point. Edric says my
husband cannot see, know or predict what happens within the sphere of a Navigator's influence. But
how far does that influence extend?"
"There are people and things in our universe which I know only by their effects," Edric said,
his fish mouth held in a thin line. "I know they have been here . . . there . . . somewhere. As
water creatures stir up the currents in their passage, so the prescient stir up Time. I have seen
where your husband has been; never have I seen him nor the people who truly share his aims and
loyalties. This is the concealment which an adept gives to those who are his."
"Irulan is not yours," Scytale said. And he looked sideways at the Princess.
"We all know why the conspiracy must be conducted only in my presence," Edric said.
Using the voice mode for describing a machine. Irulan said: "You have your uses, apparently."
She sees him now for what he is, Scytale thought. Good!
"The future is a thing to be shaped," Scytale said. "Hold that thought, Princess."
Irulan glanced at the Face Dancer.
"People who share Paul's aims and loyalties," she said. "Certain of his Fremen legionaries,
then, wear his cloak. I have seen him prophesy for them, heard their cries of adulation for their
Mahdi, their Muad'dib."