Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

old hag of a Reverend Mother played the same role. But it was the time of the tarot which he’d forecast in an early vision. The damnable tarot! It muddied the waters of Time until the prescient strained to detect moments but an hour off. Many a fish took the bait and escaped, he reminded himself. And the tarot worked for him as well as against him. What he could not see, others might not detect as well.
    The ghola stood, head cocked to one side, waiting.
    Stilgar moved across the steps, hid the ghola from Paul’s view. In Chakobsa, the hunting language of their sietch days, Stilgar said: “That creature in the tank gives me the shudders, Sire, but this gift ! Send it away!”
    In the same tongue, Paul said: “I cannot.”
    “Idaho’s dead,” Stilgar argued. “This isn’t Idaho. Let me take its water for the tribe.”
    “The ghola is my problem, Stil. Your problem is our prisoner. I want the Reverend Mother guarded most carefully by the men I trained to resist the wiles of Voice.”
    “I like this not, Sire.”
    “I’ll be cautious, Stil. See that you are, too.”
    “Very well, Sire.” Stilgar stepped down to the floor of the hall, passed close to Hayt, sniffed him and strode out.
    Evil can be detected by its smell, Paul thought. Stilgar had planted the green and white Atreides banner on a dozen worlds, but remained superstitious Fremen, proof against any sophistication.
    Paul studied the gift.
    “Duncan, Duncan,” he whispered. “What have they done to you?”
    “They gave me life, m’Lord,” Hayt said.
    “But why were you trained and given to us?” Paul asked.
    Hayt pursed his lips, then: “They intend me to destroy you.”
    The statement’s candor shook Paul. But then, how else could a Zensunni-mentat respond? Even in a ghola, a mentat could speak no less than the truth, especially out of Zensunni inner calm. This was a human computer, mind and nervous system fitted to the tasks relegated long ago to hated mechanical devices. To condition him also as a Zensunni meant a double ration of honesty … unless the Tleilaxu had built something even more odd into this flesh.
    Why, for example, the mechanical eyes? Tleilaxu boasted their metal eyes improved on the original. Strange, then, that more Tleilaxu didn’t wear them out of choice.
    Paul glanced up at Alia’s spy hole, longed for her presence and advice, for counsel not clouded by feelings of responsibility and debt.
    Once more, he looked at the ghola. This was no frivolous gift. It gave honest answers to dangerous questions.
    It makes no difference that I know this is a weapon to be used against me, Paul thought.
    “What should I do to protect myself from you?” Paul asked. It was direct speech, no royal “we,” but a question as he might have put it to the old Duncan Idaho.
    “Send me away, m’Lord.”
    Paul shook his head from side to side. “How are you to destroy me?”
    Hayt looked at the guards, who’d moved closer to Paul after Stilgar’s departure. He turned, cast his gaze around the hall, brought his metal eyes back to bear on Paul, nodded.
    “This is a place where a man draws away from people,” Hayt said. “It speaks of such power that one can contemplate it comfortably only in the remembrance that all things are finite. Did my Lord’s oracular powers plot his course into this place?”
    Paul drummed his fingers against the throne’s arms. The mentat sought data, but the question disturbed him. “I came to this position by strong decisions … not always out of my other … abilities.”
    “Strong decisions,” Hayt said. “These temper a man’s life. One can take the temper from fine metal by heating it and allowing it to cool without quenching.”
    “Do you divert me with Zensunni prattle?” Paul asked.
    “Zensunni has other avenues to explore, Sire, than diversion and display.”
    Paul wet his lips with his tongue, drew in a deep breath, set his own thoughts into the counterbalance poise of the mentat. Negative