Hunters of Dune

by Brian Herbert

  The Tleilaxu Master was not there to defend himself against the accusations.

  Looking at Duncan, Sheeana admitted, “Such tampering has been done before. A ghola can have unexpected abilities, or an unexpected time bomb inside.”

  Teg watched their attention turn to him. He was an adult now, but they still remembered his origin from the first Bene Gesserit axlotl tanks. There could be no question about his genetics. Teg had been produced under the direct control of the Bene Gesserit; no Tleilaxu had ever had an opportunity to meddle.

  None of the refugees here, not even Duncan Idaho, knew that Teg could move at impossible speeds, and that he sometimes had the ability to see no-fields that were invisible even to the most sophisticated scanners. Despite the Bashar’s proven loyalty, though, the Sisterhood had too many suspicions. They saw nightmare hints of another Kwisatz Haderach everywhere.

  The Bene Gesserit are not the only ones who can keep secrets.

  He spoke up, “Yes, we all have hidden potential within us. Only fools refuse to use their potential.”

  Sheeana looked hard at the stern, dark-haired Garimi, who had once been her close friend and protégée. Garimi crossed her arms, trying to control her obvious indignation.

  “Under other circumstances, I might have imposed banishment and exile. However, we cannot afford to diminish our numbers. Where would we send you? To execution? I think not. We have already split from Chapterhouse, and we’ve had few enough children in the intervening thirteen years. Do I dare eliminate you, Garimi, and your supporters? Crumbling factions are what one would expect from a weak and power-mad cult. We are Bene Gesserit. We are better than that!”

  “Then what do you suggest, Sheeana?” Garimi stepped out of the box of the accused and strode toward the podium where Sheeana stood. “I cannot simply ignore my convictions, and you cannot ignore our supposed crime.”

  “The gholas—all of them—will be tested again. If you are proved correct that this child is a threat, then there was no crime committed. In fact, you will have saved us all. However, if you are wrong, then you will formally rescind your objections.” She crossed her own arms, mirroring Garimi.

  “The Sisterhood has made its decision, and you defied it. I am fully prepared to grow another ghola of Leto II—or another ten gholas—to ensure that at least one survives. Eleven gholas of Duncan were killed before we charged the Bashar with protecting him. Is that what you want us to do, Garimi?” The look of horror in the other woman’s eyes was the only answer Sheeana needed.

  “In the meantime, I assign you to watch over Leto II, as his guardian. In fact, you are now responsible for all of the gholas, as the official Proctor Superior.”

  Garimi and her followers were stunned. Sheeana smiled at their disbelief. Everyone in the chamber knew that responsibility for the one-year-old boy’s life now lay solely with Garimi. Teg could not control his faint smile. Sheeana had devised a perfect Bene Gesserit punishment. Garimi did not dare let anything happen to him.

  Recognizing that she was trapped, Garimi nodded curtly. “I will watch, and I will discover what dangers lurk within him. When I do, I expect you to take the necessary action.”

  “Necessary action, only.”

  Leto Il sat innocently in his padded chair, a small, helpless-looking baby—with thirty-five hundred years of tyrannical memories locked away inside of him.

  AFTER STARING AGAIN at “Cottages at Cordeville,” Sheeana lay in her quarters, drifting in and out of sleep, her thoughts troubled and overactive. Neither Serena Butler nor Odrade had come back to whisper to her in some time, but she felt a deeper disturbance churning in Other Memory, an uneasiness. As fatigue fuzzed her thoughts, she sensed an odd sort of trap enfolding her, a vision that drew her under, more than a dream. She tried to awaken to the alarming change, but could not.

  Browns and grays swirled around her, and she saw a brightness beyond that drew her closer, pulling her body through the colors toward the light. Sounds intruded like a screaming wind, and a dry dustiness invaded her lungs, making her cough.

  Abruptly, the turmoil and noise subsided, and she found herself standing on sand, with great rolling dunes extending from the foreground to the farthest horizons. Was it the Rakis of her childhood? Or perhaps an even older planet? Oddly, though she stood barefoot in her sleeping clothes, she could not feel the surface beneath her, nor did she feel the heat from the bright sun overhead. Her throat, however, was parched.

  Surrounded by empty dunes, it seemed pointless to walk or run in any direction, and so she waited. Sheeana bent over and picked up a handful of sand. Lifting her hand high, she spilled the sand, letting it fall—but it formed an odd hourglass in the air, particles filtering slowly through an imaginary constricted opening. She watched the invisible bottom chamber begin to fill. Did it mean that time was running out? For whom?

  Convinced that this was more than a dream, she wondered if she could be experiencing a journey into Other Memory that was not just voices, but actual experiences. Tactile visions encompassed all of her senses, like reality. Had she taken a path to some other place . . . just as the no-ship had once slipped through into an alternate universe?

  As she stood in the middle of the wasteland, the sand continued to trickle through the ethereal hourglass. Would a sandworm come, if this landscape was meant to replicate the planet Dune?

  She saw a distant figure on one of the dune tops, a woman moving over the sand with a well-practiced and intentionally uneven gait, as if she had spent all her life doing it. The stranger glided down the dune face toward Sheeana, then disappeared in a valley between the undulating dunes. Moments later she reappeared on top of a closer mound of sand. The woman went down one dune and up another, coming closer to her, growing larger. In the foreground, sand continued to whisper through the bottleneck of the invisible hourglass in the air.

  Finally, the woman crested the last dune and hurried down the visible face directly toward Sheeana. Oddly, she left no footprints and spilled no loose sand.

  Now Sheeana could see that she wore an old-style stillsuit, with a black hood. Even so, a few strands of gray hair drifted around a face so dry and leathery it looked like driftwood. Her rheumy eyes were the deepest blue-within-blue Sheeana had ever seen. She must have consumed a great deal of spice for many years; she seemed incredibly ancient.

  “I speak with the voice of the multitude,” the crone said in an eerie, echoing voice. Her teeth were yellow and crooked. “You know what I mean?”

  “The multitude of Other Memory? You speak for dead Sisters?”

  “I speak for eternity, for all who have lived and all who are yet unborn. I am Sayyadina Ramallo. Long ago, Chani and I administered the Water of Life to Lady Jessica, the mother of Muad’Dib.” She pointed a gnarled finger toward a distant formation of rocks. “It was over there. And now you have brought them all back.”

  Ramallo. Sheeana knew of the old woman, a key figure in the epic of recorded history. In sending Jessica through the Agony in a Fremen sietch, not realizing she was pregnant, Ramallo had unknowingly changed the fetus inside. The daughter, Alia, had been called an Abomination.

  The Sayyadina seemed remote, a mere mouthpiece for the turmoil in Other Memory. “Hear my words, Sheeana, and heed them closely. Be careful what you create. You bring back too much, too quickly. A simple thing can have great repercussions.”

  “You want me to stop the ghola project altogether?” On the no-ship, Alia’s cells were also among those preserved in the Tleilaxu Master’s nullentropy capsule. Ramallo in Other Memory must have seen the infamous Abomination as her greatest, most tragic error, though the old Sayyadina had not lived to know Alia.

  “You want me to avoid Alia? One of the other gholas?” Alia was to be the next ghola child created, the first of a new batch that included Serena Butler, Xavier Harkonnen, Duke Leto Atreides, and many others.

  “Caution, child. Heed my words. Take time. Proceed cautiously over dangerous terrain.”

  Sheeana
moved closer to the figure. “But what does that mean? Should we wait a year? Five years?”

  Just then the sand in the imaginary hourglass ran out, and old Ramallo faded to a ghostly image that lingered like a dust devil before disappearing entirely. With her, the landscape of ancient Dune dissolved as well, and Sheeana found herself in her bedchamber again, staring into the shadows with a sense of uneasiness, and no clear answers.

  Like minds do not always blend. They can be an explosive mixture.

  —MOTHER COMMANDER MURBELLA

  F

  or more than thirteen years now, from the time she had arrived with her Honored Matre conquerors intending to rule Chapterhouse, Doria had played the game of getting along with the witches. By now, she was quite good at it. Doria had tried to tolerate their ways and learn from them in order to turn such information against the Bene Gesserit. Gradually, she had accepted some compromises in her thought patterns, but she could not alter her fundamental core.

  Out of grudging respect for the Mother Commander, she struggled to do her best with the spice operations, as she was ordered to. Intellectually, she understood the broad plan: to increase spice wealth which, along with the flow of soostones from Buzzell, would fund the unimaginable expense of building a giant military force that could stand against all renegade Honored Matres and then the Enemy.

  Still, Honored Matres often acted on impulse, not logic. And she had been raised, trained, even programmed to be an Honored Matre. Her cooperation wasn’t always easy, especially around that corpulent, supercilious witch, Bellonda. Murbella had made a grave mistake in her belief that forcing Doria and Bellonda to work together would make them grow and adapt—like an ancient atomic physicist slamming nuclei together, hoping to force a fusion reaction.

  Instead, in the years that she and Bellonda had worked in the expanding arid zone, their mutual hatred had grown. Doria found it intolerable. Together in a scout ’thopter, the two women completed yet another desert survey. The close company only made Doria detest her bovine partner more—with her wheezing and sweating and tendency to annoy. The crowded cabin had become a pressure chamber.

  When Doria finally piloted the ’thopter back to the main Keep, she flew with reckless speed, anxious to be away from the other woman. Beside her, clearly aware of her partner’s discomfort, Bellonda sat with a smug smile. Her sheer bulk seemed to throw the ’thopter off balance! In her tight black singlesuit, she looked like a lumpy zeppelin.

  All afternoon, they had exchanged tense words, vicious smiles, and sharp glances. Chief among Bellonda’s personality defects, her training as a Mentat caused her to act as if she knew everything about every conceivable subject. But she didn’t know everything about the Honored Matres. Far from it.

  Doria’s life had never been under her control. Since birth, she had been at the beck and call of one harsh mistress after another. In the Honored Matre way, she had been raised communally on Prix, out in the vast territory settled in the Scattering. Honored Matres didn’t care about the science of genetics; they let breeding take its course, depending upon which male a particular matre seduced and bonded.

  Honored Matre daughters were segregated according to their fighting abilities and sexual prowess. From an early age, girls faced repeated tests, life-or-death conflicts that “streamlined” the pool of candidates. Doria desperately wanted to streamline the bloated old Reverend Mother beside her.

  She smiled as a new image came to her. She looks like an ambulatory axlotl tank.

  Ahead, the Keep was profiled against the orange splash of the setting sun. The ever-present dust created spectacular colors across the sky. But Doria could see no beauty in the sunset, and obsessed instead on the sweating pile of flesh beside her.

  I can’t stand the smell of her. She’s probably thinking of ways to kill me, before I can stick her like the pig she is.

  As the ’thopter came in for a landing, Doria let a melange pill dissolve in her mouth, though it brought her only hints of the drug’s usual calming effects. She’d lost count of the pills she’d taken over the past several hours.

  Seeing her hunched over the controls, Bellonda said in her baritone voice, “Your small thoughts have always been transparent to me. I know you want to remove me, and you’re just waiting for the opportunity.”

  “Mentats like to calculate probabilities. What is the probability that we will land and walk calmly away from each other?”

  Bellonda considered the question seriously. “Very low, due to your paranoia.”

  “Ah, psychoanalysis! The benefits of your companionship are endless.”

  The ornithopter’s flapping wings slowed, and the craft settled with a rough jolt on the flat pavement. Doria waited for the other woman to criticize her rough landing; instead, Bellonda dismissively turned her back and fumbled with the latch on the passenger compartment door. The moment of vulnerability lit a fuse in Doria, setting off a visceral, predatory response.

  Though cramped in the craft’s cockpit, she lashed out in a snapping blow with her legs. Bellonda sensed her coming and struck back, using her greater weight to knock Doria against the pilot’s hatch just as it was opening. The Honored Matre fell through and tumbled embarrassingly onto the landing pad. Humiliated and furious, Doria looked up.

  “Never underestimate a Reverend Mother, no matter what she looks like,” Bellonda called cheerfully from the ornithopter’s cockpit door. She eased out of the ’thopter like a whale being born.

  At the rear of the landing pad, the Mother Commander waited to meet them and receive their report. Seeing the brewing altercation, however, Murbella swept toward them like an approaching thunderstorm.

  Doria didn’t care. Unable to control her rage, she sprang to her feet, knowing that all semblance of civility between them had ended forever. As the big woman dropped to the landing pad, Doria circled, ignoring Murbella’s shout. This would be a fight to the death. The Honored Matre way.

  Doria’s black singlesuit was torn and her knee scraped bloody from the awkward tumble to the rough pavement. She limped, exaggerating her injury. Also deaf to the Mother Commander, Bellonda moved with surprising speed and grace. Seeing her seemingly lamed opponent, she closed for the kill.

  But as Bellonda sprang forward in a combination fist-and-elbow attack, Doria dropped flat on the ground to let her adversary storm past—a feint—then flipped to her feet and sprang, using her whole body like a thrown kindjal. Now momentum worked against the heavyset Sister. Before she could turn, Doria slammed into her back, using hard fists to pound her kidneys.

  With a roar, Bellonda turned, trying to face her attacker, but Doria remained like a shadow on her tail, hammering hard-knuckled punches into her. Hearing ribs crack, Doria slammed harder, hoping the sharp bone shards would puncture Bellonda’s liver and lungs through all those folds of flesh. She matched each move Bellonda made, always remaining out of reach.

  Finally, when dark blood bubbled from the big woman’s mouth, Doria allowed the face-off. Bellonda charged forward like an enraged bull. Though she was already suffering from massive internal bleeding, Bellonda feigned an attack, then sidestepped Doria, striking her with a hard kick in the side. The smaller woman skidded away, thrown to the ground.

  Murbella and several other Sisters approached them from all sides.

  Glowering, Bellonda circled to Doria’s left, looking for the next opportunity to strike. The Honored Matre leaned into her opponent’s strength, a tactic designed to confuse the Reverend Mother.

  Doria had only a fraction of a second. Seeing the muscles of her adversary slacken just a little, she sprang like a coiled serpent and plunged her fingers into Bellonda’s neck, digging her nails through padded folds of skin until she reached the jugular. With a yank, she tore the blood vessel, and crimson fluid jetted upward, spurting with the force of a pounding heart.

  Doria stepped back, frozen in delighted horror as the spray struck her face and dark bodysuit. The lumbering woman’s face wore a look of surprise, as
she lifted a hand to the gushing neck wound. She could not stop the flow, or adjust her internal chemistry against such a grievous wound.

  In disgust, Doria shoved her away, and Bellonda collapsed to the ground. Smearing her opponent’s blood from her eyes, Doria stood over her in triumph, watching the life drain away. A traditional duel, the way she had been raised. Her skin flushed with the thrill. This opponent would not recover.

  Holding her bleeding neck with feebly twitching fingers, Bellonda stared up in disbelief. The fingers slipped away.

  Mother Commander Murbella gave Doria a spinning kick, bloodying her mouth. “You’ve killed her!” Another kick drove her to the ground.

  The former Honored Matre scrambled to her hands and knees. “It was a fair challenge.”

  “She was useful! You do not get to decide which of our resources we discard. Bellonda was your fellow Sister—and I needed her!” She fought to articulate words through her anger. Doria was sure the Mother Commander wanted to kill her. “I needed her, dammit!”

  Grabbing Doria by the material of her black singlesuit, Murbella dragged her closer to Bellonda and the red pool spreading around her body on the ground. “Do it! It is the only way you can make up for what you have done. It is the only way I will let you live.”

  “What?” The dead woman’s eyes were already starting to grow glassy.

  “Share. Do it now, or I’ll kill you myself and Share with both of you!”

  Bending over the warm corpse, Doria grudgingly placed her forehead against her opponent’s. She fought back her disgust and revulsion. In a matter of seconds, Bellonda’s life began pouring into her own, filling her with all the secret vitriol that this vile woman had felt for her, along with her thoughts and experiences and all of the Other Memories lodged deep in her awareness. Soon Doria possessed all of the disgusting data that made up her rival.