The tiny hidden hairs scratched her neck, fallen from her naked scalp, as she knelt razor in hand shearing all but a single lock of her chestnut hair. Basiliea had trained for three years, since she was chosen at seven to join the Atreides, and like most novitiates she was old beyond her face, her skin, her hair curled and dead at her knobbed pink knees. Kneeling for hours had hurt at first, when she had come to the Chapterhouse. Although she was light, bird-boned, little thicker than a paper waif, the interminable hours of prayer, meditation, mental and physical exercise left her muscles aching, her joints raw, and her eyes heavy with dreamless sleep.
Yet the dreams came, like clockwork every eighth day, the day of prayer and contemplation. There were no exercises that day, no instruction, no speaking. She could if she chose play music, or sit silently in the vast arboretum, hydroponic "trees" reaching miles from metal earth to shipstar center. Those days the bells rang every third hour, and they moved as if in waking dreams, their sleep disturbed by the regular rhythm of the temple priests. Here she could dance without moving, could sing without breath, all her brothers and sisters played in the tree-tops, in the red bowels, along the star-kissed metal skin.
Now though the eighth day would not be for dream play, for frivolous childish chatter, but for work and the Duty. She placed the silksteel veil upon her head, its pearly opalescence turning her from a little girl to a moving cloud, a gossamer phantasm unseen since they left the skies of Earth Unredeemed. The common folk, the Myceneans parted before her, touching their foreheads and their knees, a gentle reminder of the deep prostrations all performed during the high feasts. Though Archons might be seen as corrupted, powerful yet human, the Atreides were aliens that walked among them. Basiliea remembered her fear when a silver sister came to her mother's home, her shimmery veil parted to reveal a simple tight black utilitarian suit, her face old, tight, skin thin and tough like the broad leafed sun trees that reached not for shipstar but for the suns in the black.
She took the scenic route, through the hydroponic forests. There would be fewer adults begging for blessings or warding themselves from curses real or imagined. She could hear the silence and feel the shipstar sunlight. True, it would be quicker in the tunnels, with the trains and slideways, but she had left early and needed peace to prepare herself. Beneath her armor of training, a flower of fear struggled towards the light. She would need to graft it, weave it, carve it into another tool. Anything that could not be made a tool must be discarded. That was her first lesson, when she had to give up her playthings, her friends, even her father and mother's names. She was merely Basiliea and later Bassa or Little Ears.
Today she would be Basiliea again, but also Basiliea Atreides daughter, sister, wife to the Navigator just as her sons, brothers, husbands. Together they wove their tendrils into a silent blanket, to warm and protect the Soul. Together they went out among the people, among the fungal vats, the fusion engines, and the hydroponic forests tending, guiding, cultivating the Great Work doing the Duty. And they changed, their borrowing, growing, giving with each other and with the Sky-Father and All-Mother, the Soul of Many Masks, Atreus who had died and lived and was both ship and people, a man and a mission. The mission was hers, the name hers as well. She was Atreus, she was Basiliea.
