1 chose. Now I wonder if I have lived too long. Will the Bene Gesserit dream be abandoned for a vision less demanding, perhaps more arbitrary in nature? On occasion 1 have wondered if we of the Sisterhood have not undermined our own purpose We built our house with the materials, of faith, dedication, obedience, and hope. Do we subvert now, by our means, the very end we dreamed of achieving? Dare I question now what the Sisterhood has made-what I have helped it to become- -and not question my own role in that making9 Have we finally become, for all our intentions, like in principle to that which we sought to replace so long ago? Such doubts are dangerous. Yet they come, unbidden, from the collective memory of the past, like shadows flickering unsteadily against the dark wall of m> mind. But 1 am too old for such nonsense. To cast doubt now would be disastrous, for all our future hangs in the balance. Our cause has an enemy on the throne, his powers and resources perhaps greater even than my own. How strange that it should finally come to this' our best hope, the House of Atreides, now our greatest threat. Ah, my dear Jessica, how could you have abandoned us and all I have taught you9 Obedience to an idea is ao active virtue, an act of imagination that encompasses the future and contains the necessary discipline, It is not for the discrete present to be preserved, but the whole of what may be shaped and designed and constructed to our model. I wish to be that hand of destiny. The Chosen One shall have to wrestle with his Daemon-also a chosen one. For I, too, am chosen. In the Tarot, I have seen patches of all the enigmas of time and space. They come as lightning visions, moving me from the path of contemplation to the center of all action. My 390 position has become clearer from that day I initiated Jessica's boy into the mysteries of gum jabbar We were to become respectful foes, skilled adversaries, struggling one with the other to reach the source of Becoming, control ot an infinitely various and variable future we could both clearly see and each wanted to possess Now I am grown old and frail and almost spent m the service of this passion handed down to me and of which I have been caretaker for so long 1 saw it as a dazzling sceptre- indescribably old immeasurably nch Still, it has seemed to me at times almost too studded with tradition, too bejeweled with sacrifice, too heavily plated with precious meaning, to carry for very long Yet, with the passing generations, I have gripped it ever more tightly even as I felt myself buckling under its weight That collapse is near I will fall prey to an abomination (what a travesty1) a fact of the contingent, malevolent, darkly playful universe that not even one like myself can always foresee It is this paradox of existence, the co-existence of all opposites ot which 1 mysett am a part, that is the most difficult to manage The black aba conceals more than t