Dune: The Battle of Corrin

by Brian Herbert; Kevin J. Anderson

  The young Sorceress led them through a central corridor, passing rooms filled with patients on makeshift beds. The facility appeared to be clean and well run, with black-robed women tending the patients, but she picked up the unmistakable odor of sour sickness and decaying flesh. In this devastating incarnation of the virus, pus-filled lesions on the skin gradually covered the entire body, killing the membranous skin cells, layer by layer.

  Inside the largest grotto filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of patients in various stages of the disease, Raquella stared, reeling with the magnitude of the work to be done. She recalled Parmentier, how the Hospital for Incurable Diseases had struggled to make headway against the first manifestations of the epidemic. But it was like using a rag to mop up the tide.

  Vandego swallowed hard. “So many! Where does one begin?”

  Beside her, the black-robed young Sorceress stared, her eyes moist with frustration and grief. “In such a task, there is no beginning— and no end.”

  * * *

  FOR WEEKS, RAQUELLA toiled long hours with the patients, reducing their blistering pain with special medpacks that released supercooled melange gas into their pores. The medpacks were a joint invention she and Mohandas had developed. At the end of the Scourge so many years before, Raquella had hoped she would never need them again….

  The Supreme Sorceress remained aloof, rarely bothering to visit or acknowledge Raquella’s presence. Ticia Cenva was a mysterious, elusive figure who seemed to float on air as she walked. Once, when they locked gazes from thirty meters away, Raquella thought she detected hostility or strange fear in the woman’s expression before Ticia hurried away.

  The women on Rossak had always been very self-sufficient, ready to proclaim their superiority over others, demonstrating their mental powers. Perhaps, Raquella thought, the Supreme Sorceress did not want to admit that she was incapable of protecting her own people.

  At a communal meal for the volunteer medical workers, Raquella asked Karee about her. The younger woman said in a low voice, “Ticia doesn’t trust others, especially outsiders such as yourself. She is more afraid of the Sorceresses appearing weak than she is of the virus. And… there are things here on Rossak that we would prefer to keep away from prying eyes.”

  For a full week before requesting urgent aid from HuMed, Ticia Cenva and her Sorceresses had worked to combat the spreading plague in the cliffside cities, using their own cellular and genetic knowledge. They even turned to native herbs and drugs provided by the VenKee pharmaceutical researchers, who were also stranded on the planet due to the quarantine. But none of the attempts had been successful.

  VenKee headquarters on Kolhar shipped massive amounts of melange, in hopes the spice could aid in staving off another League-wide outbreak. While Mohandas Suk worked diligently in his sterile orbital lab aboard the Recovery, Raquella sent regular samples up to him, along with personal notes, often telling him that she missed him. He reported back periodically, summarizing the variations he saw in the Rossak strain, the difficult resistance this new retrovirus showed to the barely effective treatments they had used last time….

  Raquella became known for her gentle ways with patients, alleviating their pain and dealing with each of them as important individuals. She had learned her hospice methods long ago in the Hospital for Incurable Diseases. More often than not, her patients died. It was the nature of the new epidemic. She stared down at an aged and respected Sorceress who shuddered her last watery breath, then sank into stillness. It was a peaceful end, far different from the convulsions and psychic uproar caused by some of the victims who experienced heavy delirium before fading into unconsciousness.

  “If that is your best effort, it isn’t good enough.” Ticia Cenva stood close behind her, her face frustrated and angry; streaks of tears had long ago dried on her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” Raquella replied, not knowing what else to say. “We will find a better treatment.”

  “You had better do it soon.” Ticia swept her gaze through the crowded infirmary as if the whole epidemic was Raquella’s fault. Her face hardened into the bony features of a raven.

  “I came to help, not prove my superiority.” Raquella excused herself quickly and went to another ward, where she continued her work.

  When testing our powers against each other, challenging our skills and careful routines, we can try to prepare for every eventuality. But as soon as we face real battle, everything we know becomes mere theory.

  — ZUFA CENVA,

  lecture to Sorceresses

  Though Quentin and Faykan never suspected as much, Abulurd made regular visits to see his mother in the City of Introspection. Now, after he’d received his promotion only to be struck down again by the terrible news of his father’s brave end at the hands of the cymeks, he felt more alone than ever.

  His brother was engrossed in politics as Interim Viceroy, while Vorian Atreides focused on how best to fight the cymeks if Agamemnon and the surviving Titans were planning further action against free humanity. Abulurd could not go to either of them for commiseration or sympathy, not now.

  So, Abulurd went to see his mother. He knew Wandra couldn’t respond to anything he told her. In his entire life, he had never heard her speak a single word, but he wished he could have known her. All he knew was that his own birth had taken away her mind.

  Two days after learning of his father’s death, his shock had abated enough for him to make this visit. He was sure no one had bothered to tell Wandra her husband’s terrible fate. Likely no one, not even Faykan, considered it important or necessary, assuming she would be incapable of understanding.

  But Abulurd dressed in his spotless formal uniform, making sure to polish the new bashar’s insignia. Then he carried himself with all the dignity and impressive demeanor he could gather.

  The devotees let him through the gates of the religious retreat. They all knew who he was, but he did not speak with them. Abulurd gazed straight ahead as he walked along the gem-gravel paths, skirting ornate fountains and tall lilies that evoked a placid atmosphere conducive to deep thinking.

  For the morning, the caretakers had moved Wandra in her chair out into the sunshine next to one of the fish pools. The gold-scaled creatures darted among the weeds in search of insects. Wandra’s face was pointed toward the water, her gaze empty.

  Abulurd stood in front of her, his chin up, his back straight, his arms at his sides. “Mother, I’ve come to show you my new rank.” He stepped close, pointing to the bashar symbol, its polished metal reflecting bright sunlight.

  He didn’t expect Wandra to react, but somewhere in his heart he had to believe that his words penetrated, that perhaps her mind was still alive. Maybe she craved these visits, these conversations. Even if she truly was as empty as she seemed, Abulurd didn’t feel he was wasting his time. These were the only moments he spent with his mother.

  He’d come here more often after retrieving her from the rescue ships at the end of the Great Purge, when Salusa was deemed safe from the robot extermination force. Abulurd had personally seen to it that Wandra and her caretakers were restored to the religious retreat.

  “And… there is other news, too.” Tears filled his eyes as he thought of what he must say. Many people in the Army of Humanity had already consoled him about the loss of his father, but that had been only passive sympathy. Too many knew that Abulurd and his father had a distant relationship. Their attitude angered him, but he kept his bitter responses in check. Now that he was speaking to his mother, he had to face what he knew and admit that the news was accurate.

  “Your husband, my father, fought bravely and well in the Jihad. But now he has fallen to the evil cymeks. He sacrificed himself so that his friend Porce Bludd could get away.” Wandra showed no response, but tears now streamed down Abulurd’s cheeks. “I’m sorry, Mother. I should have been with him to help fight, but our… our military assignments did not coincide.”

  Wandra sat with bright eyes, staring disinterestedly
at the fish in the pond.

  “I just wanted to tell you in person. I know he loved you very much.”

  Abulurd paused, thinking, hoping… almost imagining that he saw a sudden glint in her eye. “I will visit you again, Mother.” He looked at her for a long moment, then turned and hurried along the gem-gravel pathways out of the City of Introspection.

  On his way, he stopped at the original crystalline coffin that held the preserved infant body of Saint Manion the Innocent. He had paid his respects at the shrine before. In the endless years of the war against the thinking machines, many visitors had come to see the baby who had sparked the entire Jihad. Abulurd stared down at his blurry reflected visage in the crystalline coffin, studying the face of the innocent child for a long time. When he left the City of Introspection he still felt very sad.

  Memories are our most potent weapons, and false memories cut deepest of all.

  — GENERAL AGAMEMNON,

  New Memoirs

  He was a prisoner without a body, trapped in limbo. The only break in the monotony of half existence came from occasional bursts of pain, images, or sounds when the other cymeks bothered to apply thoughtrodes to his sensor apparatus.

  Sometimes Quentin could see the actual horrors around him; on other occasions, in his bath of pure electrafluid, he found himself adrift with memories and ghosts in a sea of longing thoughts.

  He wondered if this was what life had been like for Wandra for so many years, trapped and disconnected, unable to respond or interact with her surroundings. Buried alive, like he had been on Ix. If her experience was anything like this, Quentin wished he had given her the blessing of a peaceful end long ago.

  He had no way of telling time, but it seemed as if an eternity passed. The Titan Juno continued to speak tauntingly yet soothingly, guiding him through what she called “a typical adjustment.” Eventually, he learned to block the worst of the phantom pain caused by nerve induction. Though it still felt as if his arms, legs, and chest were being bathed in molten lava, he had no real body that could experience the suffering. The sensations were all in his imagination— until Agamemnon applied direct inducers that sent waves of agony through every contour of his helpless disembodied brain.

  “Once you stop fighting what you are,” Juno said, “once you accept that you are a cymek and part of our new empire, then I can show you alternatives to these sensations. Just as pain is now readily triggered, you have pleasure centers as well— and believe me, they can be most enjoyable. I remember the delights of sex in the human form— in fact, I indulged in it quite frequently before the Time of Titans— but Agamemnon and I have discovered many techniques that are vastly superior. I look forward to showing them to you, my pet.”

  The odd secondary-neos who had once tended the Ivory Tower Cogitors trundled about their business, beaten and discouraged. They had adjusted to their new situation, but Quentin swore that he would never submit. He wanted nothing better than to kill all of the cymeks around him, even if it led to his own death. He didn’t care anymore.

  “Good morning, my pet.” Juno’s words thrummed into his mind. “I’ve come to play with you again.”

  “Play with yourself,” he responded. “I can offer plenty of suggestions, but they are all anatomically impossible, since you no longer have an organic body.”

  Juno found this amusing. “Ah, but now we’re also freed of organic flaws and weaknesses. We are limited only by our imagination, so nothing is truly ‘anatomically impossible.’ Would you like to try something unusual and enjoyable?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, be assured, you could never have done it in your old meat, but I guarantee you’ll like it.”

  He tried to refuse, but Juno’s articulated arms lifted toward him, and she manipulated the thoughtrode inputs. Suddenly Quentin was awash in a whirlpool of exotic, breathtakingly pleasurable sensations. He couldn’t gasp or moan, couldn’t even tell her to stop.

  “The best sex is mostly in the mind anyway,” Juno said. “And now you are entirely mind… and mine.” She hit him again, and the avalanche of ecstasy was even more intolerable than the spikes of incredible pain they had inflicted on him in his earlier punishment phase.

  Quentin clung to his loving memories of Wandra. She had been so alive, so beautiful when they’d first fallen in love, and even though that was decades ago, he held on to the recollections, like beautiful strands of ribbon from a priceless gift. He had no desire for any form of sex with this vicious Titan female, even if it was all in his mind. It corrupted his honor and shamed him.

  Juno sensed his reaction. “I can make this sweeter if you’d like.” Suddenly, with a pulse of vivid awakening, Quentin saw himself with the ghost of his body again, surrounded by visual input painted directly from his past. “I can stir your recollections, pet, reawakening thoughts stored within your brain matter.”

  As a renewed wave of orgasms rocked the core of his brain, he envisioned nothing but Wandra, young, healthy, and vital, so different from the frozen mannequin he had seen for the past thirty-eight years in the City of Introspection.

  Just having her in front of him again the way she had been gave him more pleasure than all the eruptions of stimuli that Juno playfully and sadistically released into his mind. Now Quentin reached out to Wandra, longingly— and Juno maliciously cut off the sensations and images, leaving him suspended in a dark limbo again. He couldn’t even see the cymek’s walker-form in the cold chamber.

  Only her voice came, taunting and then seductive. “You really should join us voluntarily, you know, Quentin Butler. Can you not see the advantages of being a cymek? There are many things we could do. Next time perhaps, I’ll even add myself to the images, and then we’ll have a remarkably playful time.”

  Quentin could not shout at her to go away and leave him alone. He was left in a sensory-deprived silence for an interminable time, more disoriented than ever, his anger stalled against an insurmountable barrier.

  He kept replaying over and over again what he had just experienced, how he wanted to be with Wandra again in the same way. It was a perverse thought, but so powerfully compelling that it frightened and delighted him at the same moment.

  * * *

  HIS TORMENT SEEMED to last centuries, but Quentin knew that his grasp on time and reality was suspect. His only anchor to the real universe was the thought of his previous life in the Army of the Jihad— and his passionate search for a way to attack the Titans, to hurt them even a fraction as much as they had hurt him.

  As a disembodied victim, he could not escape, would not even try. He was no longer human, had lost his body, and could never return to the life he had previously known. He did not want to see his family or his friends. Better for history to record that he had been killed by cymeks on Wallach IX.

  What would Faykan think if he could see his brave father as nothing more than a floating brain in a preservation canister? Even Abulurd would be ashamed to see him now… and what of Wandra? Despite her vegetative trance, would she react with horror to see her husband converted into a cymek?

  Quentin was trapped on Hessra while the Titans hammered at his thoughts and loyalties. Despite his greatest efforts to resist them, he wasn’t entirely certain how successful he was at keeping his secrets. If Juno disconnected his external sensors and pumped false images and sensations through his thoughtrodes, how could he ever be sure of himself?

  The cymeks finally installed him inside a small walker-form like the ones the neos utilized to go about their business in the towers on Hessra. Juno lifted her articulated arms, seated Quentin’s brain canister in the socket of a mechanical body. She used delicate digits to manipulate the controls, adjusting thoughtrodes. “Many of our neos consider this to be the time of their rebirth, when they are first able to take steps in a new walker.”

  Though his voice synthesizer was fully connected, Quentin refused to respond. He remembered the pathetic and deluded people on Bela Tegeuse, who could have been rescued long ago; instead they
had turned on their would-be rescuers, summoning Juno, willing to sacrifice even comrades for the chance to become cymeks— like this.

  Did those fools have any idea? How could anyone ask for this? They believed that becoming a cymek offered them a kind of immortality… but this was not life, just an unending hell.

  Agamemnon entered the chamber in his smaller walker-body. Juno stood beside the Titan general. “I’ve nearly completed the installation, my love. Our friend is about to take his first steps, like a newborn.”

  “Good. Then you will see the full potential of your new situation, Quentin Butler,” Agamemnon said. “Juno has assisted you so far, and I’ll continue to be your benefactor, though eventually we will ask for certain considerations in return.”

  Juno connected the last of the thoughtrodes. “Now you have access to this walker-form, pet. It is a different sort of body from what you are used to. You spent your former life trapped in an unwieldy lump of meat. Now you’ll have to learn to walk all over again, to stretch these mechanical muscles. But you’re a bright boy. I’m sure you can learn— “

  Quentin unleashed himself in a frenzy, not clear how to guide or direct his body. He thrashed with the mechanical legs, lunging forward, lurching to the side. He threw himself at Agamemnon, clattering and striking. The Titan general dodged out of the way as Quentin went berserk.

  But he could not control his movements well enough to inflict any damage. The limbs and bulky body core did not move as he imagined they would. His brain was accustomed to operating two arms and two legs, but this vessel was an arachnid form. Random impulses made his sharpened legs jitter and strike out in the wrong direction. Though he struck Juno a glancing blow and drove himself forward again into Agamemnon, his minor success was purely accidental.

  The Titan general swore, not out of fear but annoyance. Juno moved forward swiftly and delicately. Her articulated arms extended, and though Quentin thrashed about, the female cymek succeeded in disconnecting the thoughtrodes that gave him motivational power over his machine body.