Water for Paint
“Nothing but bonfires: the oracle is fulfilled;
the king’s daughter is found: such a deal of wonder
is broken out within this hour
that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it.”
--William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
With the Water of Life came understanding, a clarity of vision that Jessica at once had cause to regret. She had known this, and hesitated to drink, but the old Reverend Mother of Dune caught her off guard with the Voice. Her hand quite literally forced, Jessica lifted the vessel to her mouth, and the blood of the Worm glid easily down her throat to open her neural pathways, instigating a totality of understanding that any Guild navigator would make a devil’s bargain to possess. Yet like any devil’s bargain, the cost was high, for the lifeblood of Dune built not only arteries in the body of space, but dark veins in the consciousness of those who consumed it.
Now possessor of the complete knowledge of her female forebears, knowledge glinting inside her brain like light on the facets of a pomegranate seed, Jessica lay on the floor of the sitch, sightless, yet bearing witness to her own secret past. Through the eyes of one who must have been her mother, she observed the white face of an infant and a tall, pale man bent over the child. Her mother’s understanding unfurled without fanfare in Jessica’s mind: the child was Jessica herself, and the man was Vladimir Harkonnen.
Her father.
Like all Bene Gesserit adepts, Jessica was an orphan, the anonymous offspring of a Sister who had been ordered to preserve a particular bloodline and then, in turn, surrender her daughter to the Order. As a girl, Jessica entertained certain suspicions of her mother’s identity—Helen Mohiam’s treatment of her had always been atypically indulgent, given the Reverend Mother’s otherwise ruthless handling of her acolytes--but she had never been officially informed. Certainly no one had ever hinted at the identity of Jessica’s father. Her one aborted attempt to access the Order’s internal records had resulted in a memorable reprimand. She had never tried again.
Now the haunting question was answered, the bitter fruit consumed. Jessica was forced to confront the evil of her own choices. On Arrakis, she battled the Harkonnen by weaponizing the very people that darkest of Houses had long oppressed. The people of Dune had quickly come to rely on Jessica’s judgment, to trust in her skills. They saw her as an ally in the fight against their colonizers but, for Jessica, the Fremen were nothing more than an expedient tool.
How hard she had worked to convince herself that the Fremen benefited equally from her efforts, that she used them to save not only her son and his House, the House to which Jessica belonged, but to save Dune itself. Yet the blood of the Worm did not permit her to maintain this lie. Abruptly stripped of all artifice, Jessica saw the weakness of her excuses and was appalled by her own machinations. How like Harkonnen she had acted, and the Bene Gesserit knew best of all that the fruit never fell far from the tree. The Order’s genetic studies, performed and analyzed over the course of centuries, proved conclusively that children raised without any contact with their genetic forebears still demonstrated similar likes and dislikes, food preferences, temperamental inclinations, career choices and even hobbies.
In her spare time, Jessica enjoyed painting with watercolours. A quick scan of her new memories revealed that Vladimir Harkonnen, in his youth, had dabbled in ink and brush illustration. She saw the little pallet in his chalk-white hand; black India ink successively watered down to pale grey, and the elegant brush meeting thick, luxuriant paper. Under Jessica’s unseen gaze, sketched faces sprang to life as Vladimir filled in shadows.
Portraits, all of them, of men he had killed.
Jessica wondered if her father still drew. She thought that she would have to seek a new artistic outlet for herself on Arrakis, where no water could possibly be spared for paint.