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Barbaric arts of my time reveal me as outsider. Favorite poetry: epics. Popular dramatic ideal: heroism. Dances: wildly abandoned. Stimulants to make people sense what I took from them. What did I take? The right to choose a role in history.
-Leto II (The Tyrant): Vether Bebe Translation

Recreating one's homeworld on the ship wasn't the most creative move she could make, Sheeana knew. And she did her level best to avoid using the sensoriums wherever possible. She would not become dependent on their artificial comfort like so many others did.

But there were certain things unavailable in the city for her and music was one of them. So she found herself in the plaza at Arrakeen. The sun beat down on the cracked and ancient concrete, on Fremen travelling into the city to sell their goods, on pilgrims, on priests in their white robes. The heat was oppressive to most but to her it was life, and each ray that soaked in through her skin made her blood pulse closer to her skin.

She stood in the exact center. Old music, also native Rakian, came through from phantom instruments and she kicked her heels up. She went whirling, abandoning herself to the frenzy of movement, spinning until she was half blur, one leg held out to balance her like a figure skater. Arms flung out and aided her momentum, dark hair whipping about. She used this momentum to launch herself into higher and higher spinning leaps, sometimes coming down on a foot and sometimes on a hand. Everything melted away in the flux.

If left alone this way she could easily keep going until she collapsed. Luckily she'd left the door unlocked. She didn't much care either way if she were watched.

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He jumps towards her and then there's a quick handspring to the left as he goes around. Every movement somehow works in strange harmony with her own. Gravity seems to only be a minor hindrance, something that welcomes him back to the ground rather than forces him to stay there. There are flips and handsprings, backbends and splits, and movement that are clearly derived from multiple martial arts.

And yes, Sheeana, he can keep up.

However, he only dances around her, not with her. They are two satellites orbiting one another, never in the same space, never touching. There's only one person he would ever dance close with.

Eventually, though, the music stops, and Aang bows to her, and then puffs out, "I really like your music. Is this your home?"

She was (or could be, she didn't want to outpace him) faster than him, but still bound to the earth in a way he seemed to gleefully ignore. Is he air-bending?. She didn't mind that he wasn't close to her. This wasn't that kind of place or music.

Finally finished, she swayed in place, keeping herself from collapsing. She'd been at this for some time, it seemed. This was her nature, to throw herself into activities and give them all of herself. If she weren't Fremen and Reverend Mother, she would have been soaked with sweat.

She parted her palms horizontally, the Fremen equivalent gesture. "Thank you, Avatar. This is Keen, on Rakis. I was born in the desert, some miles outside of here." Which was true, though she'd spent three years in the priest's citadel here. It was complicated though, and she was too reserved to blurt all that out. "Are you hungry?" That put anyone at ease, save for those who suspected you of wanting to poison them.

Aang picks up his hat again and places it jauntily atop his head.

"Actually, I am a little bit. And the really good smells in the air are making me even hungrier. I wanted to talk to you anyway and meet you, since Katara thinks so highly of you."

"Well you have come to the right place." She gestured at the bustling mass, the natives in their teeming groups: Fremen from the deep desert in much patched stillsuits, 'waterfat' Spice traders, feared priests in their white robes, pious pilgrims.

She kept an embarrassed look out of her face at hearing of Katara. "The most common meal you'll find in the marketplace is a stew with roast desert hare, served in a bowl of flatbread. If you want something sweeter, try baklawa, which is a pastry made with honey and nuts, or dried paradan melon slices. And if you aren't too much a monk for it, we may be able to hunt down Spicebeer." She gently teased him, unaware of his vegetarianism.

"I think I'd maybe like to try the baklawa. I don't eat meat, though, and I don't drink."

At one of the stalls, there was a rapidfire exchange of haggling in Fremen, until the vendor recognized her and suddenly insisted she take a plate of the dessert for free. I made this simulation too accurate Sheeana thought.
She managed to convince him to take an imaginary watercoin for it at least and sat with the plate at a crumbling bench next to a stall that sold colorful spicefiber rugs. She offered him half the plate. The dessert was a sweet, flaky thing which the Fremen's Bedouin ancestors had taken from old Earth.

"This is really good!" Aang says around a full mouth, looking around at the market as he ate. His feet don't dangle from the bench because he's taller now, but the way his legs twitch make it seem like he'd be happily swinging them if he had the leg room.

"One of the things I missed most when I was trapped was being able to eat."

He tilts his head a bit, eyes closed, so the sun can reach his face.

"And the sun on my face--but it's pretty strong here."

Sheeana couldn't fail to notice the gesture. It's an enthusiastic child's movement. But then Katara had mentioned his memory being tampered with.

"So you were conscious while you were in there?" That would go some way to explaining that rampage, not that she was quite ready to let it go. "The sun is just right for me." Another small tease. "What is it you wanted to know from me?"

It's an Aang movement. He'll likely always move that way. Gyatso was an old man and still had the joy of a child.

"Yes."

Subject change.

"I wanted to know about your teachings. Katara trusts you and I trust her to make her own choices--but I also trust Sokka's judgement, too, and he's afraid what you're teaching her is changing her in bad ways. I wanted to learn about what your ways were directly from you instead of making any judgments or assumptions."

Edited 2010-03-23 07:30 (UTC)

Sheeana was momentarily taken aback. "You're...asking a lot of me. We are a very old order, so please bear with me as I try to be concise. Public opinion of us centers on the things we outwardly do: provide specialized mental training, teach the Weirding Way of combat, mediate and advise those who hire us or need it. But inwardly we are united by a single goal: The maturation of humanity."

Sheeana closed her eyes a few moments, digging back through Other Memory, talking with those memory-lives inside her. God only knew what that did to Aang's spiritual sense.

"A small portion of us, through use of the Spice Melange, become Reverend Mothers. Katara told me of the previous Avatars you are in contact with. A Reverend Mother is much the same. She has the memory-lives of other Reverend Mothers and of her female ancestors. Thus we preserve wisdom that was never written down."

There are whispers. Whispers that aren't his to hear, so he ignores them.

"What exactly are you trying to cause humanity to mature into?" Aang asks curiously. "There's a lot of things humanity could mature into, and not all of them are good."

"Any path followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. We're not interested in an end goal, but a direction. To give an example, my universe was ravaged by a charismatic dictator called Paul-Muad'dib..." She gestured at the great, ancient building that dominated the skyline in front of the plaza. "...That was his citadel. As a charismatic figurehead, he provided psychological comfort to his people. My people. Convincing us our righteousness, he turned the people of this world into fanatics, and we unleashed our Jihad on the galaxy under his holy orders. The Bene Gesserit seeks, for instance, to structure education so that humans are raised with the quickness of mind, the ability to question necessary to resist such temptations and the tyrants that offer them."

Aang thinks about this.

"So rather than guiding humanity down a specific path, you try to guide humanity away from the paths it shouldn't go down...and hope it chooses a good path on its own."

Edited 2010-03-23 08:57 (UTC)

"That is a facet of the crystal of truth. We are social engineers par excellence but to force the right choice would contradict the lesson we try to teach." Leto 2 had managed this, through a staggeringly enormous reverse psychology gambit, but she had to admit that even the wisest Reverend Mother couldn't match him. "The psychology of the masses would again become fixed on an external power for decision making."

In the air there was the faintest flinty-cinnamon scent of Spice on the breeze, which reminded her of another part to her explanation. She would get to the topic of prescience soon enough though. No need to rush.

"What do you think the right choice is?" he asks incisively. "The one that you don't think you should force?"

"The conscious one. The one that realizes we are all part of a huge social web, a web of the human species, an ecological web, and is aware of the consequences one movement on the web can have in incredibly distant spaces and times. This knowledge always changes the decision." She sighed, trying her best to articulate a truth she felt at the molecular level. How? Well if I can't make this understood to him, what hope do I have for the larger group?

"When we are children, we learn that others are as real as we are, and that our decisions effect them. Thus we change our decisions. We don't steal a toy because of the effect it would have on the other. This thinking persists into adulthood until it is mostly automatic. The kind of human we seek makes this consideration on the macro level. Their thought isn't just how will this effect the people near them but how will this effect society as a whole. So in conclusion, I suppose we aren't looking for specific decisions but to change the process of decision-making."

Which was quite a bit more hippie than their image let on.

There's a small smile.

"You're looking for balance."

Even if he hadn't been broadcasting it, she would be able to sense his contentment with her answer.

"If you had to choose one word, yes, that would be it. We don't always do so in ways you would approve of, but we seek balance."

And to think I was prepared to kill such a fresh mind. Well there's no use dwelling on that. He passed his gom-jabbar test.

"How you do it is important," says Aang. "I don't think that's something I'll agree on with you, that any way you do it is okay. Your ways are your ways and my ways are my ways and my world's ways are its ways. ...But people don't have to agree on everything."

He goes on, "That does mean what you're teaching is different from the beliefs of the Water Tribe, of our world. And it means Katara does have to let go of those beliefs to take on some of yours."

He goes on, "I can't tell her what choices to make in that--I'll love her no matter what choices she makes--but when Sokka says her training is taking her away from Water Tribe culture--it is."

He looks out on the market.

"She's giving up water and ice for the desert sun. Whatever happens, we still all have to find a way to adjust to that--she will, too."

Edited 2010-03-23 10:21 (UTC)

"You are right, by the information given you. But I think you might be under a mistaken assumption. I should have told you this first. Rakis, is not the headquarters of the Bene Gesserit." Then she spoke to the sky, which was actually a wall. "Stacy, the orchard at Central, on Chapterhouse."

And suddenly their bench was in an orchard (http://izar.deviantart.com/art/Miles-Teg-and-Darwi-Odrade-35482347), sorrounded by trees and the scent of green, growing things. Moisture was still in the air. In a clearing, a black robed Reverend Mother led a class of girls in exotic physical exercises. It couldn't have been a greater contrast from Dune.

"This is, though even this we remind ourselves is temporary. Fleeing here from Rakis after it was destroyed, I had to adjust rapidly too. I learned to take off the lens of Fremen culture when I needed to, just as Katara is learning to take off the lens of being a Water Tribeswoman. She can still put it back on, as I can still be fully Fremen when needs must. But she can also make the choice to discard traditions she once considered sacred."

"Or hold onto them. It's up to her."

There's a pause.

"Your world was destroyed?"

"Aye. The Honored Matres...They are like Bene Gesserit with no balance...burned it with their obliterator weapon. Until I came here, I was the last Fremen." She knew the choices of abandoning or keeping things, of having her people's entire history on her shoulders.

The Reverend mother in the background called "One!" and the students came up from their contortionist posture into a handspring. Among them was a small, dark skinned waif (http://thedune.ru/gallery/carroll/sheeana12.jpg)...

"...My story's not very different from yours. The Fire Nation killed my people. Even if we fix everything and bring our worlds back, and go home, I'll still be the last Airbender," says Aang, holding a hand to his heart.

Ah, Sheol. Must I? I must.

"There were no survivors then." She put a hand on his shoulder. "Surely there's someone on board with the genetic components to airbend? And perhaps your and Katara's children will have the ability?"

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