The overseers and Dragoon guards had orders to break up the reassigned crews and return the slave laborers to their original masters. Much of Poritrin’s routine work had gone undone while the Armada ships were in drydock at the spaceport, and a number of lords had expressed their impatience for life to return to normal.
But now the captives refused to move, refused to work.
Bel Moulay shouted to those close enough to hear his words, awakening seeds he had planted during secret talks, month after month. He spoke in Galach so that all of the nobles could understand him. “We do not toil for slavers! What difference is it to us if the thinking machines oppress us, or you?” He raised a fist. “God knows we are justified! We will never give up the fight!”
A howl rose in vibrating unison. The pent-up rage spread like fire over oil, faster than the Dragoon guards or the Poritrin nobles could react.
Moulay shouted toward the nobleman’s departing platform. “Niko Bludd, you are worse than the thinking machines because you enslave your own kind!”
A throng of Zenshiites and Zensunnis suddenly surrounded the astonished supervisors and disarmed them. One overseer with a black bandanna around his slick scalp held up his fists and gruffly shouted commands, but didn’t know what to do when the slaves ignored his orders. The insurgent workers clutched the man’s sleeves, tugged at his gray work gown, and dragged him back to his own holding pens, where so many of their unfortunate companions had been held after the deadly fever.
Bel Moulay had instructed the slaves in how to be the most effective. They must take hostages, not turn into a mob and slaughter the nobles outright. Only in this manner would the people have any hope of negotiating their freedom.
The bearded Zenshiite leader identified several unmanned equipment shacks and four old boats that had run aground on the low-tide mudflats; his followers set them afire. The flames rose skyward like orange flowers, spreading their smokey pollen above the spaceport. Slaves, suddenly unrestrained, poured out onto the landing grids, where they set up obstructions that prevented any commercial vessels from landing.
Some young insurgents broke through the outer cordon of astonished spectators. Flustered Dragoons overreacted and opened fire, dropping several in their tracks, but the rest of the excited slaves raced into the streets of Starda, disappearing like fish into the reeds. They ran into alleyways, hopping across floating barges and metal-roofed warehouses, where they rendezvoused with other slave children who had been waiting for this opportunity.
The breathless children passed their news in the ancient Chakobsa hunting language that every one of these repressed people could understand. And the uprising spread. . . .
• • •
TIO HOLTZMAN WAS upset and confused, ashamed that the first large-scale military deployment of his innovative shields had been such an embarrassing debacle. Preoccupied while Norma Cenva worked on her own designs, he didn’t notice for some time that his regular meal had not arrived, that his pot of clove tea had grown cold. Stymied by a complex integral, he gave up in disgust.
The house and laboratories seemed oddly silent.
Frustrated, he rang for servants, then returned to his work. Minutes later, hearing no response from the household slaves, he rang again, then bellowed into the corridors. When he saw a Zenshiite woman walking down the hall, he shouted for her. She simply looked at him with a peculiar expression and turned indignantly in the opposite direction.
He couldn’t believe it.
After he rounded up Norma, the two of them entered the room full of equation solvers. There, they found the slaves simply chatting in their own language, papers and calculation devices lying untouched in front of them.
Holtzman thundered at them, “Why don’t you finish your assignments? We have designs to complete— important work!”
As one, the solvers swept everything off the tables. Equipment clattered to the floor and papers fluttered like pigeons’ wings.
The Savant was flabbergasted. Beside him, the childlike Norma seemed to understand better than he did.
Holtzman called for the household guards, but only one responded, a sweating sergeant who clung to his weapons as if they were anchors. “My apologies, Savant Holtzman. The other Dragoons have been summoned by Lord Bludd to quell the disturbance at the spaceport.”
Holtzman and Norma hurried to the viewing platform, where they peered through a magnification scope at fires burning around the spaceport. Large numbers of people were gathered there, and even at this distance the Savant could hear crowd noises.
When their master’s back was turned, one solver shouted, “We have been slaves long enough! We will not work for you anymore!”
Holtzman spun around, but could not identify the speaker. “Are you fools as well as slaves? Do you think I recline on a divan while you all work? Have you not seen the glowglobes in my office shining into the night? This stoppage hurts all of humanity.”
Norma tried to sound reasonable. “We feed and clothe you, provide decent shelter— and the only thing we ask in return is assistance with simple mathematics. We must fight against our common enemy.”
Holtzman interjected, “Yes, would you rather be back on your smelly little uncivilized worlds?”
“Yes!” the slaves shouted, in unison.
“Selfish idiots,” he muttered, and looked out the window again at the fires and milling slaves. “Unbelievable!” He didn’t consider himself a bad master. He worked these people no harder than he worked himself.
From the viewing platform where Holtzman and Norma stood, the river appeared a particularly dismal gray, reflecting the color of thick overhanging clouds. Norma speculated, “If this uprising spreads to the agricultural fields and mines, Lord Bludd’s military forces may not be able to contain it.”
Holtzman shook his head. “Those arrogant Buddislamics think only of themselves, just as they did when they fled from the Titans. Never able to see beyond their own narrow horizon.” He shot a final glare at the room full of indignant solvers. “Now you and I will be forced to waste time dealing with people such as these, instead of our real enemies.” He spat on the floor, thinking of no other way to show his disgust. “It’ll be a wonder if any of us survive.”
He ordered the room of solvers sealed and further rations denied until they returned to work. Uneasy, Norma trotted along behind him.
• • •
THAT AFTERNOON, LORD Bludd received a list of demands from the leader of the insurrection. Protected by his followers, Bel Moulay issued a statement, demanding the release of all enslaved Zenshiites and Zensunnis from bondage, and safe passage back to their homeworlds.
At the beseiged spaceport, the rebels were keeping many nobles and overseers hostage. Buildings burned, while Bel Moulay delivered impassioned speeches from the heart of the mob, fanning the flames. . . .
Is a religion real if it costs nothing and carries no risk?
— IBLIS GINJO,
note in the margin of a stolen notebook
Timing was everything. For months, Iblis had primed his work crews and awaited the promised signal that would launch a violent, coordinated revolt. But something else had intervened, an event of staggering proportions. The slaughter of a human child by a machine, and the incredible sight of his mother fighting back— and destroying a robot!
Using this horrific crime as a springboard, Iblis hardly needed his innate abilities of persuasion. Around him he heard shouts, breaking glass, running feet. The angry slave workers required no manipulation— they wanted to do this.
The rebellion on Earth blossomed and gained violent strength in the precinct of Erasmus’s villa. Three men toppled an eagle statue from the nearest alcove; others tipped over the crown of a stone fountain in the plaza. The mob tore down vines from the sides of the main building, smashed windows. They broke through the foyer, swarming over two confused sentinel robots who had never seen such a response from the supposedly cowed prisoners. Ripping the heavy weapon arms off the dest
royed robots, the people lugged them along, indiscriminately opening fire.
The rebellion must spread.
Iblis feared that if the disturbance remained too localized, Omnius’s sentries would come and exterminate everyone. But if he could contact his other groups and send out the signal, the revolt would continue to build, spreading from settlement to settlement. Hopefully the Cogitor and his secondary had managed to assist the secret plans.
Now that the mob had been launched here at Erasmus’s villa, the real work of the insurrection must occur elsewhere. Watching the frenzy increase around him, hearing the shouts grow louder, seeing the wild destruction, Iblis decided that these people no longer needed him.
With the capital city grid illuminated by a ghostly yellow moon, Iblis issued the much-anticipated command to his core groups at other major sites. He notified the unit leaders, who in turn sent men and women surging into the streets, carrying clubs, heavy tools, cutters, any weapon that might be effective against the thinking machines.
After a thousand years of domination, Omnius was not prepared for this.
Like an avalanche, the frenzied rebels swept up others, even those who had hesitated to join the fledgling underground movement. Seeing a glimmer of hope, the slaves smashed everything technological they could find.
In the firelit darkness, Iblis climbed to a vantage point atop the Victory of the Titans frieze. From there he activated his crude transmitter. Hidden systems implanted in the chiseled wall burst forth. Every megalithic cymek statue in the mural cracked open, revealing the deadly arsenal inside.
Below in the museum square, he saw several neo-cymeks scrambling about in walker-forms. Guided by traitorous disembodied brains, the neo-cymeks rallied to attack a crowd of human rebels. Before long, other hybrid machines would arrive, undoubtedly wearing weapon-studded warrior bodies. Iblis could not let that happen.
He directed weapons fire. Rockets assembled from construction explosives launched out of embedded tubes in the frieze, exploding into the enemy. The crude blasts sheared off the fiber-metallic legs of two neo-cymeks. While they writhed on the ground and struggled to continue, Iblis shot two more rockets into their preservation canisters, spilling the electrafluids and crisping the organic brain tissue to cinders.
Even if Iblis’s followers overthrew the cymeks and the sentinel robots, the revolution would still need to deal with the all-powerful Omnius evermind. Standing high above the city grid and gazing at the spreading glow of rising fires, he felt a surge of confidence and optimism.
Bathed in surreal moonlight, the humans cheered. Flames crackled and spread in the gaudy, empty buildings of the machine capital. Near the spaceport, an armory blew up in a tremendous explosion, sending flames hundreds of meters into the air.
Iblis watched the numbers of his followers grow before his very eyes, and his heart swelled. He still could not believe the scale of what he saw occurring. Had scattered rebel cells responded to the call— or had he started this conflagration alone?
Like a chain reaction that could not be stopped, mobs ran through the streets, increasing their vengeance moment by moment.
Precision, without understanding its inherent limitations, is useless.
— COGITOR KWYNA,
City of Introspection archives
The people of Poritrin had kept slaves for so long that they had grown complacent with their comfortable, pampered way of life. As the insurgents’ stranglehold on planetary commerce tightened, word of the uprising spread to all Zensunni and Zenshiite laborers in Starda. Work shut down in the entire city— and beyond. Agricultural slaves stopped their harvesting. Some set fire to the rustling cane fields; others sabotaged farm machinery.
Encamped with the other young artisans above the granite-walled Isana canyon, Ishmael and his exhausted companions spent the night inside flapping tents that caught the evening breezes on the upland plateau.
Abruptly, Ishmael awakened, recognized Aliid shaking him. “I sneaked out and listened to the overseers. There is a slave uprising at the delta! Listen to this. . . .”
The two boys returned to their still-smoldering campfire and sat huddled in the night chill. Aliid’s dark eyes sparkled in the dim light. “I knew we wouldn’t have to wait for centuries to be free again.” His breath smelled of the spicy porridge they had received for their evening meal. “Bel Moulay will bring justice. Lord Bludd will have to grant our demands.”
Ishmael frowned, feeling little of his friend’s enthusiasm. “You can’t expect the nobles to simply shrug and change the way Poritrin society has worked for hundreds of years.”
“They’ll have no choice.” Aliid clenched his fist. “Oh, how I wish we were back in Starda so that we could join the uprising. I don’t want to hide out here. I want to be part of the fight.” He made a disgusted noise. “We’re spending our days making pretty pictures on a cliffside for the glory of our oppressors. Does that make sense?” As the boy leaned back on his hands, a smile crept across his narrow face. “We can do something about it, you know. Even here.”
Ishmael dreaded what Aliid was going to suggest.
• • •
IN THE DEAD of night, after the overseers had gone to sleep in their insulated pavilions, Aliid recruited Ishmael to the cause by promising that there would be no bloodshed. “We are just making a statement,” Aliid said, his lips upturned in a humorless grin.
The pair then flitted from tent to tent, rallying confederates. Even with a simmering uprising in far-off Starda, the guards were not overly worried about a handful of boys exhausted from hours of work on the gorge walls.
Whispering in the starlight, the young men stole harnesses from the equipment shack. With callused fingers they strapped on the connections, belting themselves across the waist and chest, securing loops under their arms, attaching cables to the cliffside pulleys.
Fourteen young slaves dropped over the cliffside where the saga of the Bludd dynasty, ten times life-size, sprawled across the canyon wall. The boys had sweated to create each meticulous pixel of the illustration, following the laser-scribed patterns designed for Lord Bludd.
Now the youths dropped surreptitiously on their cables, running across the smooth cliff face with bare toes. As he swung like a pendulum, Aliid struck with his sharp rock hammer, chipping off colorful tiles, defacing the image. The distant thunder of whitewater rapids and wind whistling around the rock formations muffled the clinking of the tool against rock.
Ishmael dropped lower than his friend and hammered away at a section of blue-glazed tiles that, when seen from a distance, would have been the dream-filled eye of an ancient lord named Drigo Bludd.
Aliid had no actual plan in mind. He hammered randomly, moving laterally and climbing up again. His small sledge flaked off hundreds of tiles in a swath of random destruction across the mosaic. Chipped tiles broke away in jewel-colored shards, falling into bottomless darkness. The other slave boys did their own damage to the spectacle of Poritrin, as if by defacing the artwork they could rewrite history.
Hushed and giggling, they worked together for hours. Though they were only vague outlines in the starlight, Aliid and Ishmael grinned at each other with boyish enjoyment at their crude vandalism, then returned to the task at hand.
Finally, as the first streaks of light began to paint the horizon, the boys clambered up the cliff face in their harnesses, returned the equipment to the supply shack, and ducked into their tents. Ishmael hoped to snatch at least an hour of rest before the overseers roused them.
They made it back undetected. At dawn, alarms sounded and men bellowed into the open air, summoning the young workers and lining them up along the cliff edge. The red-faced work bosses wanted answers, demanded to know the identity of the perpetrators. They whipped the boys, one after the other, hurting them badly enough that they wouldn’t be able to work for days; they denied them rations, cut back on water allowances.
But, of course, none of the slave boys knew a thing. They insisted they had bee
n asleep in their tents all night.
• • •
THE MALICIOUS DEFACING of the magnificent canyon mural was the final blow to Lord Bludd. He had tried to be reasonable and patient during the uprising. For weeks he attempted to use civilized means to bring Bel Moulay and his insurgent followers back into line.
When he had declared the Day of Shame, it had not worked on the psyches of the uncivilized captives— they simply didn’t care— and in the end he realized he had been deluding himself. The Zensunni and Zenshiite clans belonged to the barest fringe of the human race, practically a different species. Unable to work for the common good, these ungrateful primitives relied on the sufferance of cultured people. Based on what they had done, the Buddislamic fanatics had no moral conscience.
The slaves had sabotaged the installation of shields on Armada warships and refused to continue work on Tio Holtzman’s important new inventions. The dark-bearded insurrection leader had taken noblemen hostage and held them in slave pens. Moulay had crippled the Starda Spaceport, preventing any imports or exports, grinding all commerce to a halt. His criminal followers burned buildings, destroyed vital facilities, and ruined productive agricultural estates. Even worse, Bel Moulay had demanded the emancipation of all slaves— as if freedom was something a human being could simply have without earning it! Such an idea was a slap in the face to those billions who had fought and died to keep the thinking machines at bay.
Bludd thought of the slaughtered citizens on Giedi Prime, the victims of the cymek skirmish on Salusa Secundus, the Rossak Sorceresses who had given their lives to destroy cymeks. It disgusted him that this Bel Moulay would rally malcontent slaves to hinder every effort of the human race. The selfish arrogance of these undeserving Buddislamics!
Lord Bludd tried to communicate with them. He had expected that they would see reason, understand the stakes, and make up for the past cowardice of their people. Now, he saw that as a foolish hope.
Dune: The Butlerian Jihad Page 50
