The horrifically augmented emissaries from the outside masters stood against one of the stone walls, observing, recording. Their faces were pasty except for scarlet patches of raw flesh and unhealed wounds that held tubes and implants. The machinery made a distracting gurgle and hiss. The observers had been here, always observing Khrone and his pet project, for years. Each day, he expected one of them to break down and fall apart, but the patchwork people remained unchanged, watching, waiting.
He would show them a success today.
Three Face Dancer assistants escorted the haughty young ghola. In the guise of guards, they chose to appear as muscular brutes who could snap a neck with two fingers. Young Vladimir's hair was mussed, as if he had been dragged out of a restless sleep. With a bored expression, he looked around the stone-walled chamber. "I'm hungry."
"Better you don't eat. Less chance of vomiting," Khrone said. "Then again, one additional bodily fluid, more or less, won't make much difference by the end of the day."
Vladimir shrugged off the burly Face Dancer guards. His eyes flicked from side to side, suspicious, confrontational. When he saw the chains, the table, and the torture devices, the ghola smiled in anticipation. Khrone gestured to the equipment. "These are for you."
Vladimir's eyes lit up. "Am I to learn flaying techniques today? Or something less messy?"
"You will be the victim."
Before the boy could react, the guards dragged him over to the table. Khrone expected to see a look of panic on the round face. Instead of cursing, howling, or struggling, the young boy snapped, "How am I to trust that you know what you're doing? Or that you won't mess it up?"
Khrone's face formed a gentle, paternal smile. "I am a fast learner."
The patchwork emissaries from Outside exchanged glances, then continued to watch Vladimir, silently absorbing every instant. Khrone expected to put on a good show for their distant masters. The muscular guards strapped the young man's arms securely in place, then manacled his ankles.
"Not so tightly that he can't thrash and writhe," Khrone instructed. "That could be an important part of the process."
Vladimir raised his head and turned toward the smiling Khrone. "Will you tell me what you intend to do? Or is guessing part of the game?"
"The Face Dancers have decided that it is time to awaken your memories."
"Good. I was growing impatient." This ghola had an uncanny knack for saying the unexpected to disorient anyone who might try to gain the upper hand. His very eagerness might be an obstacle to triggering a sufficient crisis.
"My masters also demand it," Khrone continued for the benefit of the emissaries who stood against the wall. "We created you for one purpose only.
You must have your memories, you must be the Baron before you can serve that purpose."
Vladimir chuckled. "Why should I bother?"
"It is a task to which you are eminently suited."
"Then how do you know I'll want to do it?"
"We will make you want to do it. Have no fear."
Vladimir laughed again as a thicker band was strapped around his chest. Long needle spikes bit into his flesh to encourage the pain, and Khrone cinched it tighter. "I'm not afraid."
"We can change that." Khrone gestured, and his Face Dancer assistants brought forth the Agony Box.
He knew from the old Tleilaxu that pain was a necessary component in restoring a ghola's memories. As a Face Dancer with precise and intimate knowledge of the human body's nervous system and pain centers, Khrone felt he was up to the task.
"Do your worst!" The boy let out a throaty chuckle.
"On the contrary, I will do my best."
The Box was an ancient device used by the Bene Gesserit for provocation and testing. Its flat faces were engraved with incomprehensible symbols, jagged grooves, and complex patterns. "This will force you to explore yourself."
Khrone slipped Vladimir's pale, twitching hand into the opening. "It contains agony, in its purest form."
"I can't wait."
Khrone knew that this would be an interesting challenge.
For thousands of years the Tleilaxu had created gholas, and since the time of Muad'Dib they had awakened them through a combination of mental anguish and physical pain that brought the mind and body to a fundamental crisis.
Unfortunately, even Khrone didn't know exactly what was required to accomplish this. Maybe he should have brought pathetic Uxtal from Bandalong for the event, though he doubted the Lost Tleilaxu could have helped much.
The Baron ghola was particularly ripe for reawakening. Best to proceed vigorously. Khrone fitted a second Box over Vladimir's other hand. "Here we are. Enjoy the process."
Khrone activated both devices, and the young man's body jerked and twisted.
Vladimir's face grew white, his pouting lips pressed together over his teeth, his eyes squeezed shut. Spasms rippled through his face, his chest, his arms.
Vladimir tried to withdraw his hands. He must be feeling sheer torment, though Khrone smelled no burning flesh, observed no damaged body parts—that was the beauty of the Box. Nerve induction could evoke unendurable pain, and it need never stop until the victim's mind was overloaded.
"This may take a while," Khrone said, a gentle whisper beside the young man's sweaty brow. He increased the level of pain.
Vladimir shuddered. His lips drew back in a rictus, but he did not cry out.
Like water from a high-pressure hose, agony streamed into the ghola's body.
Next, Khrone thrust needles into the ghola's neck, chest, and thighs, siphoning off the adrenaline-laced chemicals that could be used as precursors for the Honored Matres' orange spice substitute. Created with such intensity and purity, Khrone was sure he could sell the product to the Honored Matres on Tleilax. The Matre Superior herself would probably consider it a fine vintage.
He could always count on the insatiable needs of Hellica's whores. Under the watchful gaze of the augmented emissaries, Khrone would demonstrate a double efficiency.
After the torture went on for hours, Khrone disconnected the Boxes and looked into the bleary eyes of the sweating young Harkonnen. "We are doing this only to help you."
The ghola looked blankly up at him. No flash of awakened memory in the spider-black eyes. "Not… that… easy."
So Khrone replaced the Boxes on the ghola's hands. With barely a second thought, he directed that two more be folded around the boy's naked feet. Four unbearable agonies would hit him. The pain was pure and unfutered, seasoned with adrenaline and garnished with anguish. The torment continued to pound upon the ghola's mind, seeking to free the locked-in memories. Vladimir twisted, cursed, and finally screamed.
But nothing changed.
When it was time for dinner, Khrone invited the patchwork representatives to join him. They left the chamber and sat in the dining hall, listening to the crash of the storm outside. Expecting to celebrate success, Khrone had ordered a long and complicated feast; now they ate each of the fine courses, then returned hours later to the lower chambers. Vladimir continued to squirm, but showed no sign of becoming himself.
"This may take days," Khrone warned the augmented emissaries.
"Then it will take days," they answered.
The Face Dancer began to question his own assumptions, realizing a problem he had not anticipated: Physical pain was not the same as mental pain. The Agony Boxes might not be sufficient.
When he looked down at the thrashing Vladimir, his sweat-drenched clothes, and the defiant grin on his flushed face, the Face Dancer realized another possible problem. The torture might be ineffective for the simple and straightforward fact that this ghola actually enjoyed it.
Part VIII: NINETEEN YEARS AFTER
1
Those who think they see most clearly are often more blind than the rest.
Bene Gesserit aphorism
Sheeana danced among the worms again as she had done as a child on Rakis.
Inside the Ithaca's huge cargo hold, the seven
creatures rose around her, twisting and waving their bodies like flexible metronomes. They formed a bizarre audience as Sheeana stamped her bare feet, flailed her arms, and twirled on the crest of the dune.
Among the people of Rakis, the sacred dance had been called Siaynoq. She kicked up dust and sand with her frenzied movements, losing herself. Siaynoq burned away her emotions and her excess restless energy. The intensity was enough to drive doubts from her mind and misery from her heart.
Responding to her dance, the worms pulled themselves high above her and swayed. Sheeana drove herself harder. Sweat droplets flew from her forehead and soaked her matted hair. She had to cleanse her thoughts, to burn this fear and doubt from her mind.
Three years ago, after leaving the dead plague planet of the Honored Matres behind its failing no-shield, Sheeana had felt the dark specter of dismay building in her mind. A world full of dead women, along with their followers and slaves—wiped out by something they could not comprehend, something that had blindsided them.
Sheeana knew that the hated Honored Matres deserved whatever appalling punishment they had brought down upon themselves. But every single person on an entire planet? Surely they had not all deserved to die in such a horrific fashion.
And that was only one world. How many other strongholds had been extinguished by the Enemy's plagues? How many trillions had perished from a disease with a 100 percent mortality rate? And how many more would the Enemy kill, now that the whores had fled like a pack of wild dogs into the vulnerable Old Empire—drawing the incredible foe with their scent?
Sheeana tripped in her dance on the soft sand. Regaining her balance, she did a backflip and continued her gyrations. Despite the exertions, she did not find the inner peace she desperately sought. The endless dance only clarified her troublesome ideas. The mélange-heavy breath of the sandworms drifted around her like the mist of an approaching storm.
At the brink of total exhaustion, Sheeana collapsed onto the sand. First she let her knees buckle, then she rolled over, heaving great hot breaths. She lay back, looking up at the high ceiling of the cargo hold. Her muscles ached, her limbs trembled. With her eyes shut, she could feel her heart beating to the rhythm of imagined war drums. She would have to consume a great deal of mélange to restore herself.
One of the creatures came close, and she could feel the sand vibrating beneath her. She sat up as the monster glided past, pushing up a dune mound and then stopping. Finding a last scrap of energy within her, Sheeana pulled herself forward and leaned against the worm's hard, curved rings. It was encrusted with dust, and she could feel the solidity of this thing, the power it contained.
She lifted her arm and rested it against the side of the beast, wishing she could just climb up on the ring segments of this worm and ride off to the horizon. But here inside the no-ship, the horizon—the hull—was not far away.
"Old Shaitan, I wish I had your knowledge."
Long ago, when she and the simpering Tleilaxu Master Waff and Reverend Mother Odrade had ridden into the desert of Rakis, a sandworm had carried them purposely to the empty remains of old Sietch Tabr. Inside, Odrade had found a hidden message from Leto II. With his incredible prescience, the God Emperor had foreseen that encounter in the far-distant future and had left words specifically for Odrade.
With such prescience, how could the God Emperor not have predicted the destruction of Rakis—or had he? Had the Tyrant made his own plans? How far did the Golden Path extend? Had his supernatural foresight been responsible for Sheeana's rescue of the last worm, so that it could reproduce on a new world, Chapterhouse? Surely, Leto II had not foreseen the Honored Matres or the Enemy of Many Faces.
Sheeana wondered if she still saw too little of the overall picture. Despite their struggles, maybe they were all unwittingly following an even larger plan the God Emperor had laid out for them.
Sheeana felt the pearl of Leto IPs awareness in the strong sandworm against her. She doubted that any plan devised by Bene Gesserits or Honored Matres could really be more prescient than the God Emperor himself.
The desert dragons began to churn the sands again. She looked up to the high plaz window and saw two small figures there, looking down at her.
2
Dirt is something solid you can hold in your hand. Using our science and our passion, we can mold it, shape it, and bring forth life. Could there be a better task for any person?
PLANETOLOGIST PARDOT KYNES, petition to Emperor Elrood IX, ancient records
From the high observation gallery above the cargo hold, two boys peered through a dust-smeared plaz window to watch Sheeana and the sandworms.
"She dances," said eight-year-old Stilgar with clear awe in his voice. "And Shai-Hulud dances with her."
"They're only responding to her movements. We could find a rational explanation for it if we studied her long enough." Liet-Kynes was a year older than his companion, who showed amazement at the dance. Kynes couldn't deny that Sheeana did things with the worms that no one else could do. "Don't try to do that yourself, Stilgar."
Even when Sheeana was not inside the hold with the great beasts, the two young friends often came to the observation gallery and pressed their faces against the plaz to stare at the uneven sands. This tiny patch of captive desert beckoned to them. Kynes squinted, letting his vision grow blurry to make the walls of the cargo hold disappear, so that he could imagine a much larger landscape.
During their intensive lessons with Proctor Superior Garimi, Kynes had seen historical images of Arrakis. Dune. With penetrating curiosity, young Kynes had delved deep into the records. The mysterious desert planet seemed to call to him, as if it were an integral part of his genetic memories.
His quest for knowledge was insatiable, and he wanted to know more than dry facts about his past life. He wanted to live them again. All of his reborn life, the Bene Gesserit had trained him and the other ghola children for that eventuality.
His father Pardot Kynes, the first official Imperial Planetologist sent to Arrakis, had formulated a grand dream of converting the wasteland into a huge garden. Pardot had provided the foundation for a new Eden, recruiting the Fremen to make initial plantings and setting up great sealed caves where plants were grown. Kynes's father had died in an unexpected cave-in.
Ecology is dangerous.
Thanks to work and resources invested by Muad'Dib and his son Leto II, Dune had eventually become lush and green. But as a cruel consequence of so much poisonous moisture, all the sandworms had died. Spice had dwindled to a trickle of a memory. Then, after thirty-five hundred years of the Tyrant's rule, the sandworms returned again from Leto's body, reversing the ecological progress and restoring the vast desert to Arrakis.
The scope of it! No matter how much battering leaders and armies and governments did to Arrakis, the planet would restore itself, given enough time. Dune was stronger than all of them.
Stilgar said, "Just looking at the desert soothes me. I don't exactly remember, but I do know that I belong here."
Kynes also felt at peace looking at this swatch of a long-lost planet. Dune was where he belonged, as well. Thanks to the advanced Bene Gesserit training methods, he had already studied as much background as he could get his hands on, learning about ecological processes and the science of planetology. Many of the original and still-classic treatises on the subject had been written by his own father, documented in Imperial archives and preserved for millennia by the Sisterhood.
Stilgar rubbed his palm across the observation window, but the blur of dust was inside the plaz. "I wish we could go in there with Sheeana. A long time ago I knew how to ride the worms."
"Those were different worms. I've compared records. These come from sandtrout spawned by the dissolution of Leto II. They are less territorial, but more dangerous."
"They are still worms," Stilgar said with a shrug.
Down on the sand, Sheeana had stopped her dance and was resting against the side of one worm. She looked up, as if she knew the two ghola b
oys were in the observation chamber, watching her. As she continued to stare toward them, the largest of the worms also lifted its head, sensing they were there.
"Something's happening," Kynes said. "I've never seen them do that before."
Sheeana dodged lightly away as the seven worms came together and piled one on top of the other, twisting into a single, larger unit that reared up high enough to reach the observation plaz.
Stilgar pulled away, more in reverence than fear.
Sheeana scrambled up the side of the entwined creatures, all the way to the top of the tallest ringed head. While the two ghola boys watched in astonishment, she resumed her gyrations for several minutes, but now she was on top of the worm's head, both a dancer and a rider. When she stopped, the worm tower divided and unraveled into its seven original components, and Sheeana rode one of them back down to the ground.
Neither of the ghola boys spoke for several minutes. They looked at each other with grins of wonder.
Below, an exhausted Sheeana walked with dragging steps toward the lift. Kynes considered making some excuse to rush down and speak with her while she was fresh from the sands, as a good planetologist should do. He wanted to smell the flinty odor of worms on her body. It would be very interesting and potentially informative. He and Stilgar both longed to understand how she could control the creatures, though each boy had a different reason for wanting to know.
Kynes followed her departure with his gaze. "Even after we get our memories back, she's going to be a mystery to us."
Stilgar's nostrils flared. "Shai-Hulud does not devour her. That is enough for me."
3
I will die four deaths — the death of the flesh, the death of the soul, the death of the myth, and the death of reason. And all of these deaths contain the seeds of resurrection.
LETO ATREIDES II, Dar-es-Balat recordings
Hunters of Dune dc-7 Page 33
