A Mentat's Misery, cont'd

“There are no infidels, only proto-Fremen.  Degenerate Fremen – those who have lost their way in the storm – use that term.”

 

“What lets you stand superior?”

 

She looked into his eyes and away with an easy rhythm that he processed as being rhythmless.  Her intimate bodily motions were functioning according to the desert rule:  when on resonant sand where a worm might hear, walk without rhythm.  Easier commanded than obeyed, it tended to draw resources.  Where was she getting hers from?

 

“I have seen the shining sun blaze white off of the desert sand.  It will be a meaningless image for you, for it seeks to convey the unconveyable.”

 

“I disagree that anything is unconveyable.  Words enfold all meaning, it is only a matter of coming to terms, of finding common ground.”

 

“Only if by word you mean percept, and by enfolding you imply metaphor.”

 

“Precisely,” he was impressed.  This was no desert savage.  He found himself reminded of memories from Bene Tleilax, during his original Mentat Training, before they took the goodness of his memories away from him through their terribly clever tortures intended to twist his ability to moralise and numb him to cruelty.  Her metaphor of the sun glinting off the desert threatened to cathexise to a tiny, hitherto unseen angle of approach back toward those effaced memories, toward not them precisely, but the same kind of feeling-state.  Nausea welled up in him in a greenish black miasma.  He froze that cathexis-threat, keeping it in standing memory, firming his guts up, and narrowing his eyes a touch.

 

“Tell me of your metaphor, then, Horse.”

 

“What’s a naked Fremen dancing on the dunes doing?”

 

A riddle game…He decided to go for simplicity.

 

“Having fun.”

 

“Why didn’t the Fremen laugh at the slouch standup artist?”

 

Slouch?  Cross-referencing came up with it being a possible form of standup comedy intended to elicit smiles rather than laughter.  That would fit the Fremen demeanour.

 

“Because he wasn’t trying too hard.”

 

“Where does a Fremen who’s about to be tortured to death spit water onto?”

 

“The eye of God, to get it over with,” he replied.  I’ve got one of my own, he thought, What does a Harkonnen Mentat do when he realises a little girl is trying to disturb his thoughts?

 

Her face metamorphosed with life, gaping.  “How can you have gotten that?”

 

“I got it over with a long time ago.”  His very truthfulness caused an imperceptible mental click as the metaphor cathexised to his long-neglected emotional pru-door.  Outwardly he gave no sign, or every sign, of being changed.  He knew in that instant that he’d been had, and she knew it, and she knew he knew these things.  How can I keep her alive? he asked himself.  She is the mother of Saphu – no!  He checked a mythologising tendency.  She is a Fremen woman who knew enough to force her torturer-interrogator to love her within minutes.  What potency these people have!  Oh, to harness it, to love it - !  With effort he tore himself away and back to the current intercourse.

 

“I’m going to have to come back to you.”

 

He got up, took the spare garment and chair, and left.  She treasured the pain in her fettered wrists that proved that she’d already won.  When he made it back to his private quarters he surrendered to himself the liberty of vomiting.

 

Piter looked at himself in the mirror.  Although his privileges were large, he kept his quarters Spartan, in with the harsh steel grillwork architecture dominating much of the rest of the arcology the Baron and his retinue currently chose to reside in.  With the unlimited water flushing his last meal away, he studied himself.  He had gotten in deep this time, attempting something ingenuously and come up against a stone veteran.  How could such a creature be so utterly sure of herself, so commanding?  He’d been in enough interrogation cum torture sessions on both sides of the table to know that it simply wasn’t that easy to stand and deliver up against an experienced inquisitor.

 

And now I don’t want anything to happen to her.  If I gave it time, I might even want her more than I do Jessica, but she’s the opposite of that prize.  Jessica appeals to my darker impulses, an object for revenge.  Horse appeals to, gah, to what I must intellectually admit is the better impulse.  A girl named Horse and I can’t stop the interrogation without jeopardising her safety further.  Yet if I proceed I will end up destroying her.  I can’t buy her, that would arouse suspicions even if it were authorised, be seen as compromising my thinking ability.  The Baron bought me stained with blood and to balk here would be tantamount to an admission of defectiveness…

 

* * *

 

Piter entered the interrogation room once more, this time wearing his usual garb of grey trenchcoat slicker and boots.  It fit in with the brutality of the livery while giving him a singular flair.  He was back to smoking again.

 

“I’ve decided in light of your skills and intelligence to give you one chance to betray your comrades and tell us the location of the sietches you know of.  If you do that, you will be released to a better fate than anything awaiting you here.  Do you understand?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Then, tell us.”

 

“They are no comrades of mine.  Any comrades I had are long since dead.  They are degenerates and even if I went back and warned them of your continued advances, your hunting program, they would do nothing.  They have lost the right to be free.  You will find them twelve marks south of False Wall South, longitude one forty degrees.  There is a nest of them, there.  I know of another off Chin Rock.”

 

“Good.  So quick to capitulate…”

 

She senses my intentions, methinks, he thought.

 

He is trustworthy now, I think, she thought.

 

“The Fremen are dangerous to the Barony, but the ones I know are wretched examples.  I supposed you will kill me now?”

 

“Kill you?  Mm.  No.  You’re more valuable as is.”

 

They looked into each other’s eyes just once without pretence.  It was like a smile seen from afar across the open bled of sand.  He looked away and strode out of the room.

 

A retainer came up beside him.

 

“Mister De Vriess, your orders for the girl?”

 

“Arrange her to be sold to Gamont.”

 

He walked on measuredly, almost delirious with success.

 

FINI