The caterpillar heads were like smooth eyeless helmets sporting a set of clacking mandibles made for chewing wood. From each thorax sprouted six pointed legs that opened and closed, reaching for something to grasp. Paul saw that many tentworms were scarred and scratched from doing combat in the confines of the tent; some worms oozed gelatinous green ichor from tears in their skin. Now freed, the caterpillars lunged toward anything that moved—including Paul and the three Swordmasters.
Bludd sheathed his cutting knife and instead whipped out his thin rapier. With a flourish, he lunged forward, skewering a caterpillar and flinging it aside so he could stab the next.
“Stay out of this, Paul,” Duncan yelled. He sliced open the side of a worm with the tip of the Old Duke’s sword. “Get out of the clearing—I don’t want you hurt.”
“You trained me yourself.” Paul brandished his knife. “There are plenty of worms for all of us to kill.”
“Lad, you’ve got that right!” Dinari began slashing and chopping, butchering a dozen of the squirming bugs in only a few seconds as they tumbled toward the four intruders.
Bludd scowled at a splurt of ichor across his chest. “Bloody Hell, Rivvy! You’re a Swordmaster of Ginaz—use a bit of finesse! People will think you grew up in a slaughterhouse.”
Two caterpillars turned their spinnerets toward the wiry Swordmaster and sprayed fresh webbing on his tunic and trousers. While Bludd clawed the sticky strands away, Dinari gave him a wry look. “You’re right, Bludd—the silk does look good on you.”
When one of the tentworms reared up in front of Paul, he stabbed the smooth head with his dagger, but the knife glanced off the chitin. Turning the dagger, he thrust again, this time jamming the point between the worm’s mandibles, then twisting. He kicked the heavy carcass aside.
The other men did not pause in their mayhem. Bludd taunted from the side, “That’s fifteen for me so far, Rivvy. What’s your count?”
“Pah. I don’t have time to count!
A squirt of slime splashed onto Bludd’s face and across his ruffled tunic. Scowling, he skewered the offending worm twice for good measure. Worms still spilled from the tent, but many more carcasses lay inside, their flaccid empty bodies gnawed by their stronger brothers.
Soon dead caterpillars lay everywhere. Their squirming and squeaking sounds filled the glade, along with the slash-and-squish of hard fighting. Paul killed three more. Fighting at Duncan’s side, he waited for a group of four to lunge at them, then together they slashed and cut.
“I was hoping for the chance to train you under practical conditions, Master Paul,” Duncan said.
Paul grinned. “And how am I doing so far?”
From the corner of his eye, a flash of motion alerted him. He spun and ducked simultaneously, but not fast enough. A falcon-moth came at him like a dive-bomber, its long narrow wings like an ornithopter’s, its head torpedo-shaped. The moth slammed into Paul, moving too fast to pass through the shimmering body shield. The impact sent the moth reeling, and a dusty cloud of dislodged scales from its wings blew everywhere.
The falcon-moth’s antennae waved like feathers, each as wide as Paul’s outstretched hand. Its wings drummed against the shield as it tried to orient itself and dive in again, but Duncan slashed its abdomen. Yellowish guts spilled out.
As the dying moth wheeled away, then came back, Paul’s dagger caught the antennae. The creature flew away drunkenly and one wing caught in the loose fabric of the cocoon tent. After struggling like a fly in a spiderweb, the gutted moth crashed to the ground amid the dead caterpillars.
“Oho, a trophy for Duncan Idaho and his young companion!” Dinari bellowed. “Even I’ve never managed to kill a falcon-moth on the wing.”
“Dirty things,” Bludd spat.
Catching their breath, the Swordmasters strode about like scavengers in the aftermath on a battlefield, stabbing the few remaining worms and then wiping the slime from their blades.
“You did well, Paul,” Duncan said, wiping ichor from his face.
“Now there’s a battle to remember,” Dinari added.
Bludd said in a sing-song voice, “Young Paul Atreides, Conqueror of Caterpillars and Slayer of Squirmers! You have earned this wedding silk for your father’s bride.”
The boy walked over to the still-twitching, somehow sad form of the huge falcon-moth. “It was only trying to protect its nest. The silk didn’t mean that much to me.”
A shadowy, uneasy feeling came over him. A falcon and a hawk . . . how much difference was there? At the thought of what this moth had done, he felt a shudder of realization: Duke Leto would have done a similar thing, throwing himself into certain destruction if it was his only chance to save his family.
His family, Jessica and Paul . . . and now Ilesa Ecaz. And whatever children they might have. And how many others?
“On the bright side, we don’t have to be careful any longer,” Bludd said cheerfully. “We can retrieve all the tent-silk for ourselves. I’ve never had such an extravagant haul.”
“It’s going to be a very large wedding for Duke Leto.” Duncan smiled at Paul, sure his young ward must be excited about the upcoming celebration.
But Paul could only see all the strands of silk, the tangled webs, and the dead falcon-moth that lay among its slaughtered young.
The End
SEA CHILD
A Tale of Dune
Copyright © 2006. Originally published in Elemental: The Tsunami Relief Anthology, Steven Savile & Alethea Kontis eds., Tor Books
“Sea Child” takes place during the events of Frank Herbert’s last Dune novel, Chapterhouse Dune. The beleaguered Bene Gesserit Sisterhood face their destructive dark counterparts, the Honored Matres, who have destroyed the planet Dune.
Bene Gesserit punishments must carry an inescapable lesson, one which extends far beyond the pain.
—Mother Superior Taraza, Chapterhouse Archives
As she had done since the brutal Honored Matres conquered Buzzell, Sister Corysta struggled to get through the day without attracting undue notice. Most of the Bene Gesserit like herself had already been slaughtered, and passive cooperation was the only way she could survive.
Even for a disgraced Reverend Mother such as herself, submission to a powerful though morally inferior adversary galled her. But the handful of surviving Sisters here on the isolated ocean world—all of whom had been sent here to face years of penance—could not hope to resist the “whores” that arrived unexpectedly, in such overwhelming force.
At first, the Honored Matre conquerors had resorted to primal techniques of coercion and manipulation. They killed most of the Reverend Mothers during interrogation, trying unsuccessfully to learn the location of Chapterhouse, the hidden homeworld of the Bene Gesserits. Thus far, Corysta was one of twenty Sisters who had avoided death, but she knew their odds of continued survival were not good.
Back in the terrible Famine Times after the death of Leto II, the God Emperor of Dune, much of humanity had scattered into the wilderness of star systems and struggled to survive. Left behind in the core of the old Imperium, only a few remnants had clung to the tattered civilization and rebuilt it under Bene Gesserit rule. Now, after fifteen hundred years, many of the Scattered Ones were coming back, bringing destruction with them. At the head of the unruly hordes, Honored Matres swept across planets like a raging spacestorm, returning with stolen technology and grossly altered attitudes. In appearance, the whores bore superficial similarities to the black-robed Bene Gesserits, but in reality they were unimaginably different, with different fighting skills and no apparent moral code—as they had proved many times with their captives on Buzzell.
As dawn gathered light across the water, Corysta went barefoot to a jagged inlet, finding precarious balance on slippery rocks as she made her way down to the ocean’s edge. The Honored Matres kept the bulk of the food supplies for themselves, offering little to the surviving inhabitants of Buzzell. Thus, if Corysta failed to find her own food, she would sta
rve. It would amuse the whores to find out that one of the hated Bene Gesserits could not care for herself; the Sisterhood had always taught the importance of human adaptation for survival in challenging environments.
The young Sister had a knot in her stomach, pangs of hunger similar to the pains of grief and emptiness. Corysta could never forget the crime that had sent her to Buzzell, a foolish and failed effort to keep her baby secret from the Sisterhood and their interminable breeding program.
In moments of despair, Corysta felt she had two sets of enemies, her own Sisters and the Honored Matres who sought supremacy over everything in the old Imperium. If the Bene Gesserits did not find a way to fight back—here and on other planets—their days would be numbered. With superior weaponry and vast armies, the Honored Matres would exterminate the Sisterhood. From her own position of disadvantage, Corysta could only hope her Mother Superior was developing a plan on Chapterhouse that would enable the ancient organization to survive. The Sisterhood faced an immense challenge against an irrational enemy.
In a fit of violence, the Honored Matres had been provoked into unleashing incredible weapons from the Scattering against Rakis, the desert world better known as Dune. Now, that planet was nothing more than a charred ball, with all sandworms dead and the source of spice obliterated. Only the Bene Gesserits, on faraway Chapterhouse, had any stockpiles left. The whores from the Scattering had destroyed tremendous wealth simply to vent their rage. It made no sense. Or did it?
Soostones were also a source of wealth in the Known Universe, and they were found only on Buzzell. Therefore, the Honored Matres had conquered this planet with its handful of punished Bene Gesserit Sisters. And now they meant to exploit it . . .
At the water’s edge, Corysta reached into the lapping surf, withdrawing her hand-woven traps that gathered night-scurrying crustaceans. Lifting her skirt, she waded deeper to retrieve the nets. Her special little cove had always provided a bounty of food that she shared with her few remaining Sisters.
She found footing on the slick surface of a submerged rock. The moving currents stirred up silt, making the water murky. The sky was steel gray with clouds, but she hardly noticed them. Since the arrival of the Honored Matres, Corysta spent most of her time with her gaze lowered, seeing only the ground. She’d had enough punishment from the Bene Gesserit. As unfair as it was in the first place, her suffering had been exacerbated by the whores.
As she pulled in the net she had laid at sunset, Corysta was pleased to feel its heaviness, which indicated a good catch. Another day without starvation. With difficulty she dragged the net to closer to the rocks—and discovered that its tangled strands held not a clatter of shellfish but, instead, a weak and greenish creature. A small humanoid baby with smooth skin, large round eyes, a wide mouth, and gill slits. She recognized the creature as one of the genetically modified “phibian” slaves the whores had brought to Buzzell for harvesting soostones. It was just an infant, floating alone and helpless.
Catching her breath, Corysta splashed back to the shore rocks behind her. Phibians were cruel and monstrous—no surprise, considering the vicious whores who had created them—and she was afraid she would be beaten for interfering with this abandoned child. Adult phibians would accuse her of catching the infant in her nets, claim that she had killed it. She had to be very careful.
Then Corysta saw the baby’s eyes flutter open, its gills and mouth gasping for oxygen. A bloody gash marred the infant’s forehead; it looked like an intentional mark drawn by the single claw of a larger phibian. This child was weak and sickly, with a large discoloration on its back and side, a glaring birthmark like ink spilled on its small body.
An outcast.
She had heard of this before. Among the phibians, the claw wound was a mark of rejection. Some aquatic parent had scarred its own frail child in disgust because of the birthmark, and then cast the baby away to perish in the seas. Stray currents had brought it to Corysta’s nets.
Gently, she untangled the creature and washed the small, weak body in the pool. It was male. Responding to her ministrations, the sickly phibian stirred and opened its alien, membranous eyes to look at her. Despite the monstrous appearance, Corysta thought she saw humanity behind the strange eyes, a child from the sea who had done nothing to deserve the punishment inflicted upon it.
She gathered the baby in her arms, folding him in her black robe to hide him from view. Looking around, Corysta quickly ran home.
Buzzell’s deep, plankton-rich oceans swallowed all but a few patches of rough land. It was as if the cosmic creator had accidentally left a water tap running and filled the planet to overflowing.
On the only patch of dry land suitable for use as a spaceport, Corysta worked with several other beaten Bene Gesserit Sisters. The women carried heavy sealed boxes of the milky soostones. After all their specialized training, including a remarkable ability to control their bodily chemistry, Corysta and these defeated Sisters were nothing more than menial laborers forced to work while the brutal Honored Matres flaunted their dominance.
Two Bene Gesserit women walked beside Corysta with their eyes cast down, each one carrying a heavy satchel full of the harvested gems. The Honored Matres enjoyed grinding the disgraced Reverend Mothers under their heels. During their exile here, Corysta and her fellow Sisters had all known everyone’s crimes and supported one another regardless. But in their current situation, such minor infractions and the irrelevant penance and retribution meant nothing. She and her companions knew the impatient whores were sure to kill them soon, rendering their life histories meaningless. Now that the phibians had arrived as a specialized workforce, the Sisters were no longer necessary for the economic processes of Buzzell.
On Corysta’s left, five adult phibians rose out of the water, lean and powerful forms with frightening countenances. Their unscaled skins shone with oily iridescence; their heads were bullet-shaped, streamlined for swimming. The Honored Matres had apparently bred the creatures using technology and knowledge brought by Tleilaxu gene masters who had also fled in the Scattering. Experimenting with human raw materials, had those Tleilaxu outcasts cooperated willingly, or had they been forced by the whores? The sleek and glistening phibians had been well designed for their underwater work.
The humanoids stood dripping on the land, carrying nets full of gleaming soostones. Corysta no longer found the jewels appealing. To her, they had the look and smell of the blood that had been spilled to get them. Thousands of Buzzell inhabitants—exiled Sisters, support personnel, even smugglers and traders—had been slaughtered by the Honored Matres in their takeover.
The whores in charge of the work crew snapped orders, and Corysta took a webbed net from the first phibian. On the creature she smelled salty moisture, an iodine-laced body odor, and an undertone of fish. The slitted eyes were covered by a moist nictitating membrane.
Looking at the repugnant face, she sensed coldness, and wondered if this might be the father of her sea child, who was now secretly recovering in her hut. As that thought crossed her mind, the adult phibian struck a blow that knocked her backward. In a bubbly voice, the creature said, “Too slow. Go work.”
She grabbed the satchel of soostones and scurried away. She did not want the Honored Matres to focus on her. Her instinct for survival was ever-present.
No one would be coming to rescue them. Since the devastation of Rakis, the Bene Gesserit leadership had holed up on Chapterhouse to hide from the unrelenting hunters. She wondered if Taraza was still Mother Superior of the order, or if—as rumor suggested—the Honored Matres had killed her on Rakis.
On this backwater world, Corysta and her companions would never know.
That evening, in her hut lit by a glowing fish-oil lamp, Corysta cradled the phibian baby in her arms and fed it broth with a spoon. How ironic that her own child had been taken from her by the Breeding Mistresses, and now in a strange cosmic turnabout she had been given this . . . creature. It seemed a cruel joke played by Fate, a monster in exchan
ge for her beautiful baby.
Immediately she chastised herself for thinking that way. This poor subhuman child had no control over its surroundings, its parentage, or the fate that had befallen it.
She held the moist, cool baby close in the dim light and could feel the strange humming energy of its body next to hers, almost a purring sensation that made no detectable sound. At first the baby had fussed about the spoon, refusing to eat from it, but gradually, patiently, Corysta coaxed it to accept the thin broth boiled with crustaceans and seaweed. The baby hardly ever whimpered, though it looked at her with the saddest expression she’d ever seen.
Life was so unpredictable, moment by moment and year by year, and so chaotic within the much larger chaos of the entire universe. People were anxious to do this and that, to go in directions they imagined were important.
As Corysta gazed down at the phibian and made gentle eye contact with it, she had the sensation of supreme balance, that the time they were spending together had a healing influence on the frenzied cosmos . . . that all of the chaos wasn’t really what it appeared to be, that her actions and experiences had a larger, significant purpose. Each mother and child extended far beyond their own parochial circumstances, far beyond the horizons they could see or even begin to imagine.
In the distant past, the Bene Gesserit breeding program had focused on creating a genetic foundation that would result in the Kwisatz Haderach, supposedly a powerful unifying force. For thousands of years the Sisterhood had sought that goal, and there had been many failures, many disappointments. Worse, when they finally achieved success with Paul Atreides, Muad’dib, the Kwisatz Haderach had turned against them and torn apart their plan. And then his son, Leto II, the Tyrant—
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