Sandworms of Dune Page 3

  Learning that the Guild possessed some of the immature sandworm vectors, Waff demanded them for his work. Though he could not remember how to create melange in an axlotl tank, this experiment had much greater potential. By resurrecting the worms, he could not only bring back spice, but the Prophet himself!

  Unafraid of the sandtrout, he reached into the aquarium with a small hand. Grabbing one of the leathery creatures by its fringe, he pulled it flopping out of the sand. Sensing the moisture in Waff’s perspiration, the sandtrout wrapped itself around his fingers, palm, and knuckles. He poked and prodded the soft surface, reshaping the edges.

  “Little sandtrout, what secrets do you have for me?” He formed a fist, and the creature flowed around it to form a jellylike glove. He could feel his skin drying out.

  Carrying the sandtrout, Waff went to a clean research table and set out a wide, deep pan. He tried to unwrap the sandtrout from his knuckles, but each time he moved the membrane it flowed back onto his skin. Feeling the desiccation in his hand now, he poured a beaker of fresh water into the bottom of the pan. The sandtrout, attracted by a larger supply, quickly plopped into it.

  Water was deadly poison to sandworms, but not to the younger sandtrout, the larval stage of the worms. The early vector had a fundamentally different biochemistry before it underwent the metamorphosis into its mature form. A paradox. How could one stage in the life cycle be so ravenously drawn to water, while a later phase was killed by it?

  Flexing his fingers to recover from the unnatural dryness, Waff was fascinated as the specimen engulfed the water. The larva instinctively hoarded moisture to create a perfectly dry environment for the adult. From previous-life memories that did remain within him, he knew of ancient Tleilaxu experiments to move and control worms. Standard attempts to transplant full-grown worms onto dry planets always failed. Even the most extreme offworld landscapes still had too much moisture to support such a fragile—fragile?—life-form as the sandworms.

  Now, though, he had a different idea. Instead of changing the worlds to accommodate sandworms, perhaps he could alter the worms themselves in their immature stage, help them adapt. The Tleilaxu understood the Language of God, and their genius for genetics had achieved the impossible many times. Had not Leto II been God’s Prophet? It was Waff’s duty to bring Him back.

  The concept and chromosomal mechanics seemed simple. At some point in the sandtrout’s development, a trigger changed the creature’s chemical response toward a substance as simple as water. If he could only find that trigger and block it, the sandtrout should continue to mature, but without such a deathly aversion to liquid water. Now that would be a true miracle!

  But if one prevented a caterpillar from spinning a cocoon, would it still transform into a great moth? He would have to be very careful, indeed.

  If he understood what the witches had done on Chapterhouse, they had discovered a way to release sandtrout into a planetary environment—the Bene Gesserit homeworld. Once there, the sandtrout reproduced and began an unstoppable process to destroy (remake?) the whole ecosystem. From a lush planet to an arid wasteland. They would eventually turn the world into a total desert, where the sandworms could survive and be reborn.

  More questions continued to follow, one after another. Why were the fleeing Bene Gesserit Sisters carrying sandtrout samples aboard their refugee ships? Were they trying to distribute them to other worlds, and thereby create more desert planets? Habitats for more worms? Such a plan would require a huge concerted effort, take decades to come to fruition, and kill off the native life on a planet. Inefficient.

  Waff had a much more immediate solution. If he could develop a breed of sandworm that tolerated water, even thrived around it, the creatures could be transplanted onto innumerable worlds where they could grow swiftly and multiply! The worms would not need to reconstruct a whole planetary environment before they began to produce melange. That alone would save decades that Waff simply did not have. His modified worms would provide all the spice the Guild Navigators could ever desire—and serve Waff’s purposes as well.

  Help me, Prophet!

  The sandtrout specimen had absorbed all the water in the pan and now gradually moved about the base and sides, exploring the boundaries. Waff brought research tools and chemicals to the laboratory table—his alcohols, acids, and flames, his deep sample extractors.

  The first cut was the hardest. Then he began to work on the shapeless, squirming creature to pry loose its genetic secrets in any way he could.

  He had the best DNA analyzers and genetic sequencers the Guild could obtain . . . and they were very good, indeed. The sandtrout took a long time to die, but Waff was certain the Prophet wouldn’t mind.

  A stench seeps from my pores. The foul odor of extinction.

  —SCYTALE,

  the last known Tleilaxu Master

  The small, gray-skinned child looked worriedly at his older but identical counterpart. “This is a restricted area. The Bashar will be very angry with us.”

  The older Scytale scowled, disappointed that a child with such a magnificent destiny could be so timid. “These people have no authority to impose their rules on me—either version of me!” Despite years of preparation, instruction, and insistence, Scytale knew that the ghola boy still did not grasp who he was. The Tleilaxu Master coughed and winced, unable to minimize his physical problems. “You must awaken your genetic memories before it is too late!”

  The child followed his older self down the dim corridor of the noship, but his steps were too shaky to be furtive. Occasionally the degenerating Scytale needed support from his twelve-year-old “son.” Each day, each lesson, should bring the younger one closer to the tipping point at which his embedded memories would cascade free. Then, finally, old Scytale could allow himself to die.

  Years ago, he had been forced to offer his only bargaining chip—his secret stash of valuable cellular material—to bribe the witches. Scytale resented being put in such a position, but in return for the raw makings of heroes from the past for the witches’ own purposes, Sheeana had agreed to let him use the axlotl tanks to grow a new version of himself. He hoped it wasn’t too late.

  For years now, every sentence, every day increased pressure on the younger Scytale. His “father,” a victim of planned cellular obsolescence, doubted he had another year before collapsing completely. Unless the boy received his memories soon, very soon, all the knowledge of the Tleilaxu would be lost. Old Scytale winced at the dire prospect, which hurt him far more than any physical pain.

  They reached one of the vacant lower levels, where a testing chamber had gone unnoticed in the empty expanses of the ship. “I will use this powindah teaching equipment to show you how God meant for the Tleilaxu to live.” The walls were smooth and curved, the glowpanels tuned to a dull orange. The room seemed to be full of gestating wombs, round, flaccid, mindless—the way women were supposed to serve a truly civilized society.

  Scytale smiled at the sight, while the boy stared around with dark eyes. “Axlotl tanks. So many of them! Where did they all come from?”

  “Unfortunately they are merely holographic projections.” The high-quality simulation included mock tank sounds, as well as the odors of chemicals, disinfectants, and medicinals.

  As Scytale stood surrounded by the glorious images, his heart ached to see the home he missed so much, a home now utterly destroyed. Years ago, before he was allowed to set foot again in sacred Bandalong, Scytale and all Tleilaxu had always undergone a lengthy cleansing process. Ever since the Honored Matres had forced him to flee with only his life and a few bargaining chips, he had tried to observe the rituals and practices as much as possible—and had vigorously taught them to the young ghola—but there were limitations. Scytale had not felt sufficiently clean in a long time. But he knew that God would understand.

  “This is how a typical breeding chamber used to look. Study it. Absorb it. Remind yourself of how things were, how they should be. I created these images from my own memories, an
d those same memories are within you. Find them.”

  Scytale had said the same thing again and again, hammering it into the child. His younger version was a good student, very intelligent, and knew all the information by rote learning, but the boy didn’t know it in his soul.

  Sheeana and the other witches didn’t grasp the immensity of the crisis he faced, or perhaps they didn’t care. The Bene Gesserits understood little about the nuances of restoring a ghola’s memories, could not recognize the moment when a ghola was perfectly ready . . . but Scytale might not have the luxury of waiting. The child was certainly old enough. He should awaken! Soon the boy would be the only Tleilaxu left, with no one to wake his memories.

  As he surveyed the rows of breeding vats, the junior Scytale’s face filled with awe and intimidation. The boy was drinking it all in. Good. “That tank in the second row is the one that gave birth to me,” he said. “The Sisterhood called her Rebecca.”

  “The tank has no name. It is not a person and never was. Even when it could speak, it was only a female. We Tleilaxu never name our tanks, nor the females that preceded them.”

  Expanding the image, he allowed the walls to disappear into a projection of a vast breeding house with tank after tank after tank; outside were the spires and streets of Bandalong. These visual cues should have been sufficient, but Scytale wished he could have added other sensory details, the female reproductive smells, the feel of the sunlight of home, the comforting knowledge of countless Tleilaxu filling the streets, the buildings, the temples.

  He felt achingly lonely.

  “I should not still be alive and standing before you. It offends me to be old and in pain, with my body malfunctioning. The kehl of true Masters should have euthanized me long ago and let me live on in a fresh ghola body. But these are not proper times.”

  “These are not proper times,” the boy repeated, backing through one of the detailed holo-images. “You have to do things you would not otherwise tolerate. You must use heroic means to stay alive long enough to awaken me, and I promise you, with all my heart, that I will become Scytale. Before it is too late.”

  The process of awakening a ghola was neither simple nor swift. Year after year, Scytale had applied pressures, reminders, mental twists to this boy. Each lesson and each demand built, like a pebble added to the pile, higher and higher, and sooner or later he would add enough to that unstable mound to trigger an avalanche. And only God and his Prophet could know which small stone of memory would cause that barrier to come crashing down.

  The boy watched the flickering moods cross his mentor’s face. Not knowing what else to do, he quoted a comforting lesson from his catechism. “When one is faced with an impossible choice, one must always choose the path of the Great Belief. God guides those who wish to be led.”

  The very thought seemed to consume Scytale’s last energy, and he slumped into a nearby chair in the simulation room, trying to recover his strength. When the ghola hurried to his side, Scytale stroked the dark hair of his alternate self. “You are young, perhaps too young.”

  The boy placed a comforting hand on the old man’s shoulder. “I will try—I promise. I’ll work as hard as I can.” He squeezed his eyes shut and seemed to push, as if wrestling with the intangible walls inside his brain. At last, perspiring heavily, he gave up the effort.

  The elder Scytale felt despondent. He had already used all the techniques he knew to push this ghola to the brink. Crisis, paradox, unrelenting desperation. But he felt it more than the boy did. Clinical knowledge was simply insufficient.

  The witches had used some sort of sexual twisting to bring back the Bashar Miles Teg when his ghola was only ten years old, and Scytale’s successor was already two years past that mark. But he could not bear the thought of the Bene Gesserit women using their unclean bodies to break this boy. Scytale had already sacrificed so much, selling most of his soul for a glimmer of hope for his race’s future. The Prophet Himself would turn his back on Scytale in disgust. Not that!

  Scytale placed his head in his hands. “You are a flawed ghola. I should have thrown away your fetus and started anew twelve years ago!”

  The boy’s voice was rough, like torn fiber. “I will concentrate, and push my memories out of my cells!”

  The Tleilaxu Master felt a weary sadness weighing him down. “It is an instinctive process, not an intellectual one. It must come to you. If your memories don’t return, then you are of no use to me. Why should I let you live?”

  The boy was visibly struggling, but Scytale saw no flash of awe and relief, no sudden flood of a lifetime’s experiences. Both Tleilaxu reeked of failure. With each passing moment, Scytale felt more and more of himself dying.

  The fate of our race depends on the actions of an unlikely collection of misfits.

  —from a Bene Gesserit study on the human condition

  In his second life, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen had done well for himself. At only seventeen, the awakened ghola already commanded a large castle filled with antique relics and a retinue of servants to satisfy his every whim. Better yet, it was Castle Caladan, the seat of House Atreides. He sat upon a high throne of fused black jewels, gazing around a large audience chamber as attendants went about their duties. Pomp and grandeur, all the trappings a Harkonnen deserved.

  Despite appearances, though, the ghola Baron had very little real power, and he knew it. The Face Dancer myriad had created him for a specific purpose and, despite his reawakened memories, managed to keep him on a tight leash. Too many important questions remained unanswered, and too much was out of his control. He didn’t like that.

  The Face Dancers seemed much more interested in their young ghola of Paul Atreides—the one they called “Paolo.” He was their real prize. Their leader Khrone said that this planet and the restored castle existed for the sole purpose of triggering Paolo’s memories. The Baron was just a means to an end, of secondary importance in the “Kwisatz Haderach matter.”

  He resented the Atreides brat for it. The boy was only eight and still had much to learn from his mentor, though the Baron hadn’t yet determined what the Face Dancers really wanted.

  “Prepare him and raise him. See that he is primed for his destiny,” Khrone had said. “There is a certain need he must fulfill.”

  A certain need. But what need?

  You are his grandfather, said the annoying voice of Alia inside the Baron’s head. Take good care of him. The little girl taunted him incessantly. From the moment his memories were restored, she had been there waiting for him in his mind. Her voice still contained a childhood lisp, exactly as she had sounded when she’d killed him with the poisoned needle of the gom jabbar.

  “I’d rather take care of you, little Abomination!” he yelled. “Wring your neck, twist your head—once, twice, three times! Make your delicate little skull pop right off! Ha!”

  But it’s your own skull, dear Baron.

  He clamped his hands against his temples. “Leave me alone!”

  Seeing no one else in the room with their master, the servants looked at him uneasily. The Baron fumed and slumped back in his glittering black chair. Having embarrassed and angered him, the Alia voice whispered his name tauntingly one more time and faded away.

  Just then, a jaunty and self-important Paolo strode into the chamber, followed by an entourage of androgynous Face Dancers who acted as his protectors. The child carried an air of overconfidence that the Baron found at once fascinating and disconcerting.

  Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and this other Paul Atreides were inextricably meshed, simultaneously drawn together and repelled, like two powerful magnets. After the Baron’s memories had been restored and he understood enough of who he was, Paolo had been brought to Caladan and handed over to the Baron’s tender care . . . with dire warnings should any harm befall him.

  From his high black chair, the Baron glared down at the cocky youth. What made Paolo so special? What was the “Kwisatz Haderach matter”? What did the Atreides know?

  For
some time, Paolo had been sensitive, thoughtful, even caring; he had a stubborn streak of innate goodness that the Baron had been working diligently to eradicate. Given time, and enough harsh training, he was sure he could cure even the honorable core of an Atreides. That would prime Paolo for his destiny, all right! Though the boy still struggled with his actions occasionally, he had made considerable progress.

  Paolo came to an impertinent halt in front of the dais. One of the androgynous Face Dancers placed an antique handgun into the boy’s hand.

  Angrily, the Baron leaned forward for a better view. “Is that gun from my personal collection? I told you to stay out of those things.”

  “This is a relic of -House Atreides, so I’m entitled to use it. A disk gun, once carried by my sister Alia, according to the label.”

  The Baron shifted on his throne, nervous to have the loaded weapon so close to him.

  “It’s just a woman’s gun.”

  Inside the thick black armrests the Baron had secreted his own weapons, any one of which could easily turn the boy into a wet smear—hmm, fresh material for growing another ghola, he thought. “Even so, it’s a valuable relic, and I don’t want it damaged by a reckless child.”

  “I won’t damage it.” Paolo seemed pensive. “I respect artifacts that my ancestors used.”

  Anxious to keep the boy from thinking too much, he stood. “Shall we take it outside, then, Paolo? Why don’t we see how it works?” The Baron gave him an avuncular pat on the shoulder. “And afterward we can kill something with our bare hands, like we did to the mongrel hounds and ferrets.”

  Paolo seemed uncertain. “Maybe another day.”

  Nevertheless, the Baron hurried him out of the throne room. “Let’s get rid of those noisy gulls around the midden piles. Have I mentioned how much you remind me of Feyd? Lovely Feyd.”