A Mentat's Misery

By Narziss, rc (Feb. 7-15, 2007)

 

“No one ever understands the importance of the subjective,” Piter said as he produced his lighter.  Of late he’d become fond of those long-filtered cigarillos affected by degenerate aristocratic women on their visits to Gamont, where they teased the desperate sybarites with their very unavailability.

 

The yellow-painted room was bright, exceptionally bright as per his orders, to the point he resorted to a pair of tight, heavily smoked glass goggles.

 

In one corner of the room slouched the effectively blinded form of that Fremen girl snagged recently by one of the deep desert patrols – still fettered and time-drugged as he was no fool regarding the desert dwellers’ martial prowess.  Luck for all three of them, then:  the patrolmen’s luck that they came back at all, the girl’s luck to be in for some rare experiences, and his luck to be able to administer them.  Almost joyous, he waved the guard behind his right shoulder away and the door closed, and started thinking in earnest.

 

What would be an appropriate personality here?  Homosexual assassin?  Father figure?  No, these creatures were fragmented in some way by their upbringing, with an astounding tolerance for pain.  That invited something a little more…personal.

 

I am me, myself, and I, Piter thought.  It is by will alone I set my mind in motion, through the juice of Saphu the thoughts acquire speed, the speed acquires clumsiness, the clumsiness becomes a warning:  it is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

 

He felt the darkness settle over him like a cherished comforter.

 

There was little he hadn’t considered in depth as regards the realm of torture; few things he hadn’t tried on one subject or another, but, he’d never allowed himself the luxury of boredom.  Boredom was a mental crime.  Every experience was a new dawn, a freshness.  One does not deny information to a Mentat.

 

She’ll be coming out of it in the next minute or so.

 

Her stillsuit had been torn off of her and deposited in a plaz bin outside the room’s metal only door, leaving her naked and coated in smears of brownish-clear grease at the chafing points of ankles, back of the knees, groin, armpits, back of neck.  He noted the lack of finger prints on his mental report of guard obeisance.  From her height and breasts he gauged her age as breedable, though with characteristic Fremen paucity of hair it remained uncertain.  Marriageable by Imperial standards, anyway.

 

Her light brown hair was long for her kind, nearly reaching the shoulders.  She was found this way according to reports, wandering the desert blinded and cloakless, caulless – witless, in a word.

 

His experience with Fremen was limited.  He knew their Galachian dialect as well as any offworlder.  They tended to like talk, even sometimes trying proto-voicing techniques he’d been under the impression – erroneous, obviously – that only Bene Gesserit-trained scions knew.   They weren’t “fun” to interrogate.  Further research revealed that they serviced a kind of religion revolving round the ministrations of Reverend Mothers, as they termed them, and his prime calculation there guessed this to be the vine of a seed planted by the Sisterhood itself long ago.  It fit their style.

 

What do I know of Fremen sexuality?

 

He moved into the centre of the room and sat on the metal, lone chair there-bolted to the floor, twisting round with legs crossed to face the subject.

 

Reports have come up negative regarding essential practices or taboos.  They appear indifferent to pornography when it doesn’t elicit laughter from them.  Prime calculation – good hell!  A Prime Calculation two sentences into the report? – indicate lifetime marriage bonds, nuclear family structure assisted and nested within fluid sietch power structure.  Extreme loyalty to sietch-tribe, honour-bonds, fanatical honesty used in a fashion easily deceiving to off-worlders.

 

Yes, but what gets them off?

 

Spice orgy.

 

Define.

 

Prime calculation:  Excessive consumption of varied doses of spice, possibly in both raw and processed forms, en group, purposing to induce tribal historical character-related hallucinations and so imprint the individual into the tribe.

 

This brought a tiny fluttering memory near to his recollection.  He isolated it, froze it with a conscious memory-tab, and continued.

 

Further analysis strongly suggests classic tribal flexibility in sexual relations due to circumambient desert survival conditions.  Probably an extreme level of autonomy within individual pair-bonding, inside equally extreme overarching tribal law.  All captured Fremen displayed complete sexual impotence when put into varying levels of skilled contact with carefully selected prostitutes.  No further data.

 

He puffed on the cigarillo.

 

“-,” he paused, a word on the tip of his delicate tongue, and recalculated.

 

Mentat dysfunction: foundation threat.  Research….Excess emotionalism clouding judgement…related to: costume.

 

He exhaled, got up, ticked on the metal door for it to be opened and, once it was, departed.

 

That was close, he thought, It would be far more appropriate and make use of a singular opportunity to test my nativity theory, were I to come across as Fremen, or, at least, quasi-Fremen.  Even if she’s unbalanced for a few seconds, that might give me invaluable information into their informal society.

 

* * *

 

When Piter returned a few minutes later he wore nothing but a thin white robe with the hood pulled back, a delicate off-world, stylised copy of the common Fremen Jubba cloak.  Under one arm he kept a second cloak folded.

 

She squinted at him when he entered, eyes not wavering when the metal door clicked shut with a small resonance.  Goggleless, he was unaccustomed to the lighting and immediately moved toward the chair.

 

“Lights?” he motioned with one arm, and the lights dimmed on preestablished command.  It was still quite bright, but not harsh.

 

He sat down on the chair as before, and looked toward her.

 

When he’d first arrived on Giedi Prime, he’d dimmed his appreciation of facial features, amplifying his appreciation of face per se.  Everything lay on the razor’s edge of the Baron’s fickleness, and he knew that no matter how valuable he was, he was, by the very fact of his purchased existence here, expendable if he so much as too much annoyed the Baron in any way.  Thus, he’d copied the proper expressions of face to a nicety.

 

And here is a face if I ever saw one, he thought.  She bore the delicacy of youth, but cut in the spare, almost harsh lines of the desert, to give that distinct, and distinctly lovely, “Fremen look.”  He noted her diminished squint reflex, compensated for by hyperconstricting irises.  She still must find the lighting overmuch, he figured. 

 

“Would you care for some clothing?” he asked.

 

She pressed her lips together and reflexively swallowed, eyes glancing to the robe and back.

 

“I’m a servant of the Harkonnens,” he spoke, carefully.  “I’m here to talk with you about your travels, about you.  I’m going to ask you many questions.  Would you care for some clothing?  I can have you released from those if I can trust you not to attack me.”

 

“You’re a Harkonnen?”

 

“I serve them, yes.”

 

“Willingly?”

 

“What choice do we have whom we serve?”

 

“You know not God?”

 

“I don’t understand what the word ‘God’ means.  I guess you don’t want this – “ he tossed the clothing down beside the chair leg, as if to sulk.

 

“You’ve got a bit of intelligence in you, then,” she said, staring past him and apparently comforted by her greasy skin.

 

“What should I call you?”

 

She looked back at him briefly.

 

“What is your name?”

 

“Horse.  Of course.  And yours?”

 

“Do you know what a horse is?”

 

“It’s like a Kulon, only taller and sturdier, better bred for prowess, not pack work.”

 

“Very good.  Why do I have a bit of intelligence in me for professing ignorance of the word ‘God’?”

 

“A Harkonnen interrogator with interests in theology?”

 

Mentat dysfunction warning: dyslexia – does she mean I am, thus, a good interrogator, or that my concern over a nicety gives me an inappropriate interest?  He chose an ambiguous reply.

 

“I prefer psychology and metaphysics to struggle to meet, rather than presume they have already made each others’ acquaintance.”

 

“You’re conservative.”

 

“I wouldn’t know what to conserve.  I’m cautious -”

 

She looked at him, fettered and helpless – a testament to his caution.

 

“- around things I don’t understand.”

 

“Wise enough for an entrance strategy – “ she replied

 

“- but foolish from the start,” he finished the maxim.  “We’re not going to trade backwater maxims, are we?”

 

She spat accurately onto his face without warning.  The spittle connected with nose and stuck just under his right eye.  Blinking, he started processing what had happened.  Ambiguous contact gesture slash marking behaviour.  Water is priceless on Arrakis, and yet is something everyone has.  From a desert culture any expenditure of water is on the level of exorbitance.  Time running out, amplify speed.  She’s gifting me with water.  No, dyslexia!  The only question is my behaviour, to determine if I’m…

 

He moved a hand economically to his face and wiped the moisture away, looked at it briefly on his fingers and then sucked them dry.  The spittle had a tinge of oil-taste to it, but was otherwise clean and fluid.

 

“My thanks to your honour of me.”

 

“No Fremen, you!”

 

“I disagree, I’m the freest of men that I know.”

 

In her silence, too late the Fremen maxim came to him:  “Only spit poison!”  What poison had he just ingested?  Obviously not a bodily one, but, a mental one perhaps – a poison intended solely to put him off balance for a few seconds, to prove that he could be put off balance!  Crafty creatures, these!

 

He rose and came round to her, hands at the ready.

 

“I’m going to help you up into the chair.  That’s all I’m going to do.”

 

She suffered his help onto her fettered feet and over toward the metal chair.

 

Once done, he moved to the door, knocking twice.  It opened, and he left, returning posthaste with a second chair, which he then sat down on as the door was relocked.

 

“Tell me of your religion, Horse.  I am an infidel, but I seek knowledge.”

 

CONTINUED