Hunters of Dune dc-7

by Herbert Brian

  They were smart enough to realize they were pawns.

  The withered Honored Matre Ingva often talked with Uxtal about mélange, as if she didn't think—or care—that the Waffs could hear her. She demanded to know when the children would reveal their secrets.

  Waff wasn't aware that he had any secrets. He didn't remember any.

  "They mirror and mimic each other," Uxtal said to Ingva. "I have heard them speak simultaneously and make the same noises, the same motions. The other ghola groups are growing even faster, it seems."

  "When can we get started?" Ingva hovered close to him, making the little researcher squirm. "I am not reluctant to threaten you—or tempt you—with a sexual experience beyond your most incredible fantasies."

  Uxtal seemed to shrink into himself and answered in a voice that cracked with fear. "Yes, those eight are as ready as they are ever going to be. No sense in waiting any longer."

  "They are expendable," said Ingva.

  "Not exactly expendable. The next batch is six months younger, and the others are even more recently removed from the tanks. Twenty-four in all, of varying ages. Even so, if we are forced to kill all eight of these, there will be others soon. We can try again and again and again." He swallowed hard. "We have to expect a certain number of mistakes."

  "No, we don't." Ingva released the force field and licked her lips. She and Uxtal entered the protected chamber while the lab assistants stood guard outside. The eight gholas clumped together, backing away. Until now, they had not known that numerous other Waff gholas were being raised elsewhere in the large laboratory building.

  Uxtal gave the accelerated ghola children a forced smile of encouragement, which none of the Waffs believed. "Come with us. There's something we have to show you."

  "And if we refuse?" demanded Waff Three.

  Ingva chuckled. "Then we will drag you—unconscious, if necessary." Uxtal wheedled, "You will learn why you are here, why we made you, and what you have that we need."

  Waff One hesitated, looked at his identical brothers. It was a temptation they could not resist. Though they had received forced educational induction, given inexplicable background to lay a foundation for something, the gholas were hungry to understand.

  "I will go," Waff One said, and he actually took Uxtal's hand, pretending to be a sweet child. The nervous researcher flinched at the touch, but led the way out of the protected chamber. Waffs Two through Eight followed.

  They entered a confined laboratory where Uxtal paraded the gholas in front of a spectacle—several brain-dead Tleilaxu Masters hooked up to tubes and instruments. Drool curled down gray chins. Machines covered their genitalia, pumping, milking, filling translucent bottles. The victims all looked uncomfortably like Waff, only older.

  Uxtal waited while the staring children absorbed what they saw. "You used to be that. All of you."

  Waff One raised his pointed chin with some measure of pride. "We were Tleilaxu Masters?"

  "And now you must remember what you were. Along with everything else."

  "Line them up!" Ingva ordered. Uxtal handed the Waff roughly to an assistant and waited until all of the accelerated children stood in front of him.

  Strutting back and forth in front of the identical copies like a caricature of a commander, Uxtal made explanations and demands. "The old Tleilaxu Masters knew how to manufacture mélange using axlotl tanks. You have that secret. It is buried within you." He paused, clasped his small hands behind his back.

  "We don't have our memories," one of the Waffs said.

  "Then find them. If you remember, we will let you live."

  "And if we don't?" Waff One asked defiantly.

  "We have eight of you here, and others elsewhere. We need only one. The rest of you are completely disposable."

  Ingva chuckled. "And if all eight of you fail us, then we will simply turn to the next eight and repeat the process. As many times as necessary."

  Uxtal tried to look intimidating. "Now, which of you will reveal what we need to know?"

  The matching gholas stood in the line; some fidgeted, some remained defiant.

  It was a standard ghola-awakening technique, to drive a person to psychological and physical crisis, forcing the buried chemical memories to overcome the barriers inside.

  "I don't remember," the Waffs all said in perfect unison.

  A commotion interrupted them, and Uxtal turned as Matre Superior Hellica, resplendent in a purple bodysuit and flowing veils and capes, strode into the chamber leading a small Guild delegation and a floating, hissing chamber that held a mutated Navigator. Edrik himself!

  "We came to watch the completion of your task, little man. And to reach financially acceptable terms with the Navigators, should you succeed."

  Surrounded by plumes of cinnamony-orange gas, Edrik approached a viewing window in his tank. The eight gholas felt the tension in the chamber increase.

  Uxtal gathered enough courage to yell at the Waffs, though he seemed almost comical doing so. "Tell us how to make spice in the axlotl tanks! Speak, if you want to live."

  The Waffs understood the threat and believed it, but they had no memories to reveal, no stored knowledge. Sweat blossomed on their small gray foreheads.

  "You are Tleilaxu Master Tylwyth Waff. All of you. You are everything he was.

  Before he died on Rakis, he prepared replacement gholas of himself here on Tleilax. We used cells from those"—he jerked his head toward the miserable mindless men on their extraction tables—"to create the eight of you. You hold his memories stored in your minds."

  "Obviously, they require more incentive," Matre Superior Hellica said, looking bored. "Ingva, kill one of them. I don't care which."

  Like a murderous machine, the old Honored Matre had been waiting to be activated. She could have attacked with a traditional flurry of kicks and blows, but she had come prepared for something more colorful. She drew a long slaughtering knife she had confiscated from the neighboring slig farmer. With a sideways sweep of the monoblade and a quick flash of blood, Ingva decapitated Waff Four in the middle of the line.

  As the head hit the floor, Waff One cried out in sympathetic pain, along with his surviving brothers. The head rolled to a stop at an odd angle, to stare with glazing eyes at the blood pooling out from the neck stump. The gholas all tried to run like panicked mice, but were brutally restrained by the assistants.

  Uxtal turned greenish, as if he might either faint or vomit. "The memories are triggered through psychological crisis, Matre Superior! Simply butchering one of them is not sufficient. It must be prolonged, an extended anguish. A mental dilemma—"

  Hellica nudged the bloody head with her toe. "The torture wasn't intended for this one, little man, but for the seven others. It's a basic rule: If one inflicts only pain, the subject can cling to hope that the torture will end, that he may somehow survive." A thin smile robbed the Matre Superior's face of all beauty. "Now, however, the others have not the slightest doubt that they will be killed if I say they are to be killed. No bluffing. That certainty of death should provide the correct trigger… or they will all die. Now, proceed!"

  Ingva left the small body lying there.

  "Seven of you remain," Uxtal said, reaching a crisis point of his own. "Which of you will remember first?"

  "We don't know the information you request!" Waff Six shouted.

  "That is unfortunate. Try harder."

  As Hellica and the Navigator watched, Uxtal signaled Ingva. The woman took her time choosing, drawing out the tension, walking slowly up and down the ranks of the young gholas. The Waffs trembled and then shook, as she prowled behind them.

  "I don't remember!" Waff Three wailed.

  Ingva responded by thrusting the point of her bloody slaughtering knife into his back and out his chest, piercing his heart on the way through. "Then you are of no use to us."

  Waff One felt a sharp pain strike his own heart, as if an echo of the blade had stabbed there, too. The clamor in his mind reached a cresce
ndo. He no longer had any thought of defiance or of withholding information. He did not resist the memories or past lives inside him. He squeezed his eyes shut and screamed silently to himself, begging his body to divulge what it knew.

  But nothing came to him.

  Ingva lifted her long blade, jerking the Waff Three ghola into the air with it, his legs still kicking. Then she let him slide off the tip, and he thudded to the floor. Ingva stepped back, waiting to be called again. She was clearly enjoying this.

  "You make this more difficult than it needs to be," Uxtal said. "The rest of you can stay alive—all you have to do is remember. Or does death mean nothing to a ghola?"

  With a disappointed sigh, he nodded again, and Ingva killed another one.

  "Five left." He looked down at the unpleasant mess, then glanced apologetically to Hellica. "There is a possibility that none of these gholas is acceptable. The next batch will be ready soon, but perhaps we should prepare more axlotl tanks, just in case."

  "We're trying!" one of the Waffs cried.

  "You are also dying. Time is running out." Uxtal waited for a moment, until his anticipation turned to clear dismay. He was sweating, too; his entire career, such as it was, was hanging on the line.

  Ingva killed another one. Half of the Waffs now lay dead on the floor.

  Moments later she killed a fifth, stepping up behind him, grabbing his dark hair, and slitting his throat.

  Frantic, the remaining three Waffs tore at their own hair and struck themselves in the chests and faces, as if physical blows could dislodge memories. Weaving back and forth with her long knife, Ingva slashed at them, making shallow and playful cuts in their gray skin. Despite their continued frantic protestations, she murdered a sixth ghola.

  Only two remained.

  Waff One and his last identical sibling—Waff Seven—could feel hidden thoughts and experiences boiling through the turmoil in their minds, like regurgitated food. Waff One watched the agony around him, saw the corpses of his brothers.

  The memories were locked away, but not by the veils of time; rather, he suspected the old Masters had implanted some sort of internal security system.

  "Oh, just kill them all!" Hellica said. "We have wasted your time today, Navigator."

  "Wait," Edrik said through a speaker in his tank. "Allow this to play out."

  The tension and the panic in the two remaining gholas had reached a peak. By now the pressure of the crisis should have caused a critical meltdown.

  Acting on her own, without looking at Uxtal or the Matre Superior, Ingva drew the slaughtering knife across the belly of Waff Seven and eviscerated him.

  Blood and entrails spilled out, and he doubled over, screaming, trying to hold his intestines inside. He took a long time dying, and his moans filled the room, with Uxtal's repeated demands for information as a counterpoint.

  Now the Matre Superior herself strode forward, glaring at Uxtal. "This is a tedious failure, little man. You are worthless." She drew a small, stubby dagger from her waist. Moving up to Waff One, she pressed the point against his temple. "This is the thinnest point in your skull. I'd barely need to press at all to shove my blade into your brain. Maybe that will cut loose your memories?" The knife's tip drew a drop of dark blood. "You have ten seconds."

  Waff was giddy with terror, and only distantly aware that both his bowels and his bladder had let loose. Hellica began counting down. Numbers like sledgehammers struck his mind. Numbers… formulae, calculations. Sacred mathematical combinations.

  "Wait!"

  The Matre Superior completed her countdown. The Navigator continued to observe. Uxtal himself trembled in terror, as if convinced she would kill him next.

  Waff suddenly started babbling a steady stream of information that he had never learned from the forced-education systems. It flowed out of him like sewage from a burst pipe. Materials, procedures, random quotations from the secret catechism of the Great Belief. He described secret meetings with Honored Matres aboard a no-ship, about how the old Tleilaxu had meant to betray the Bene Gesserit, how he and his fellow Masters did not trust the oddly changed Lost Tleilaxu from the Scattering. Lost Tleilaxu such as Uxtal…

  "Please withdraw your knife, Matre Superior," the Navigator said.

  "He has not yet revealed what we need!" Ingva brandished her own blade, apparently anxious to murder the last ghola, as if she had not yet spilled enough blood for one day.

  "He will." Uxtal looked at the terrified, miserable ghola. "This Waff has just been buried by the mudslide of his past life."

  "Many lives!" In desperate self-defense, the reawakened Master spewed forth what he could. But his memory was imperfect, and he couldn't get it all. Whole segments of knowledge were corrupted—a side-effect of the forbidden acceleration process.

  "Give him time to sort through it all," Uxtal said, sounding pathetically relieved. "Even with what he has said already, I can see the path to new methods that may yield mélange." Hellica still pressed her short knife against Waff's head. "Matre Superior! He is too great a resource to waste at this time. We can coax more out of him."

  "Or torture it out," Ingva suggested.

  Uxtal grabbed the sweaty hand of the last ghola. "I require this one for my work. Otherwise, there will be delays." Without waiting for an answer, he yanked the weak-kneed Waff away from the macabre scene.

  "Clean this up," Hellica demanded of Ingva, who in turn ordered the lab assistants to do it.

  As Uxtal hurried away with his young charge, he lowered his voice to a threatening whisper. "I lied to save your life. Now give me the rest of the information."

  The ghola nearly collapsed. "I remember nothing more. It is all still churning inside me, but I can sense great gaps. Something is wrong—"

  Uxtal cuffed him. "You had better come up with something good anyway, or both of us are dead."

  12

  As human beings, we have trouble functioning in environments in which we feel threatened. The threat becomes the focus of our existence. But "safety" is one of the great illusions of the universe. Nowhere is it truly safe.

  Bene Gesserit Study on the Human Condition, BG Archives, Section VZ908

  The Handlers welcomed their visitors as friends and allies, wanting to hear more about their struggles with the Honored Matres. The group sat on the roof of one of the wide cylindrical towers. On a flat stone in the middle of the plank floor, a brazier sent a warm, comforting glow into the night.

  "We knew you would be coming," Orak Tho said. "When you dropped the no-field to launch your small ships, we detected your great vessel above us. We are aware that you have also sent scavenging teams to uninhabited portions of our world. We were waiting for you to come visit us directly."

  Squatting next to Sheeana, Miles Teg was surprised, since these people seemed to have very little technology. "It would take sensitive detectors to spot us."

  "Long ago we developed a means to sense the ships flown by Honored Matres, for our own protection. Because those women think they are infallible, it is easier to detect them."

  "Hubris is their principal weakness," Thufir Hawat said.

  Green eyes flashed from the bandit mask of dark skin. "They have many weaknesses. We've had to learn how to exploit them."

  They shared a meal of nuts, fruit, smoked fish, and medallions of a spiced dark meat that apparently came from an arboreal rodent. The Rabbi was more relaxed than Sheeana had ever seen him, though he seemed worried about the origin of the food. She could tell that the old man had already made up his mind: He wanted his people to settle here, if the Handlers would have them.

  While they sat together on the open rooftop, listening to the buzz of night insects and watching the swoop of dark birds, Sheeana felt very isolated.

  According to scan reports, the Handlers' population was relatively large, with mines and industries in other parts of the world. They had apparently developed a quiet and peaceful civilization. "We assume your people originated in the Scattering, long ago after
the Tyrant's death. Was this planet the first stop on your wandering?"

  The Chief Handler shrugged his bony shoulders. "We have myths about that, but it was more than a thousand years ago."

  "Fifteen centuries," Thufir suggested. He was a bright student. Considering his past and his place in history, the Mentat ghola was quite interested in spans of time.

  "Our race spread to many nearby worlds. We were not an empire but a… political brotherhood. Then out of nowhere the Honored Matres came like a stampede of blind and clumsy animals, as destructive in their ignorance as in their malevolence." Orak Tho bent his elongated face toward the brazier's glow. Orange light washed across his skin.

  Other Handlers sat around the upper deck's circular wall, listening and muttering. Their distinctive body smells drifted into the cool air. Their race seemed to have an affinity for scents, as if smell was an important part of their communication abilities.

  "Without warning, they came to pillage, destroy, and conquer." Orak Tho's face was as hard as petrified wood, his long jaw set. "Naturally, we had to stop this feral incursion." His lips curved in a faint smile. "So we developed our Futars."

  "But how did you do that?" Sheeana asked. If these deceptively simple people could detect orbiting ships and create sophisticated genetic hybrids, their technology must be far more advanced than was evident.

  "Some of those who joined us in settling these worlds were orphans of the Tleilaxu race. They showed us how to change our offspring to create what we needed, since God and evolution would be much too slow to provide them for us."

  "The Futars," Teg said. "They are most interesting." After their initial reunion, the Handlers had taken the predatory creatures off to holding areas, where they could be with others of their own kin.

  "What happened to these Tleilaxu?" The Rabbi looked around. He had never much liked Master Scytale.