Sisterhood of Dune

by Brian Herbert; Kevin J. Anderson

  The moisture-seal door had been broken open, and two bodies lay on the stone floor. Vor ran toward the flurry of fighting inside the tunnel just in time to see Elgar, looking panicked. One of the intruders grabbed him from behind, tugged on his hair, planted a knee in his back, and snapped his spine. The attacker then discarded him, tossing the body to the floor.

  Vor stared at Andros and Hyla. They saw him and smiled. “Oh, there you are,” the young man said.

  “Who are you?” Rage filled Vor, and he held the knife in front of him, though he remembered the minimal effect weapons had on these two. “How do you know me?”

  Andros and Hyla were not concerned about the dozens of Freemen fighters who came to face them. The young woman took a step forward, casually placing her heel on Elgar’s broken spine. “You are Vorian, son of Agamemnon—don’t you recognize us?”

  The young man said, “We know what you did to our father and the rest of the Titans … how you betrayed us all.”

  Hyla stepped forward. “But blood runs strong and thick, and you are our brother. Maybe we can find it in our hearts to forgive you.”

  Brother? Vor felt as if an asteroid impact had rocked his entire world. He knew that General Agamemnon had kept sperm samples from centuries ago, before he had discarded his human body. Hoping to find a worthy successor, Agamemnon had used surrogate mothers to bear sons for him, all of whom he’d found inadequate. Vorian had been his best hope, and later his greatest disappointment. Vor could not deny that these two appeared to share the Atreides genes, but one was a daughter.

  “Come with us,” Hyla said, “and we’ll decide your worth.”

  “Or should we kill all these others first?”

  With a brave and foolish yell, Inulto threw himself toward Andros, slashing with the dagger. The moment he moved, Hyla dismissively reached out and caught the young man’s throat with one hand. Inulto flailed, stabbed with his knife as she crushed his larynx and tossed him on the floor like a broken doll. Her skin and her brother’s flickered with quicksilver. The knife cuts on her arm went only as deep as the topmost layer of skin, with hardly any blood.

  As soon as Hyla killed Inulto, five of the desert men rushed forward, howling. The twins fought them like a pair of dust-devils, breaking bones, smashing skulls, crushing opponents against the walls.

  “Stop!” Vor yelled, then turned to Sharnak. “Tell your fighters to back away. I’ll go with them. I never wanted any of your people hurt.”

  But the leather-skinned Naib looked furious. He shouted to two fighters, “Restrain Vorian Atreides. Keep him away from those two.”

  As the desert men grabbed his arms, Vor struggled, but they were very strong. “Let me fight my own battles, damn you!”

  “No—because that is exactly what they wish,” Sharnak said. “They can’t have you. And if you are in league with them…”

  Now the Freemen warriors attacked the twins in force, and proved to be far more difficult opponents than a weary spice-harvesting crew. Through sheer ferocity, they drove Andros and Hyla back as they hacked away at the quicksilver-impregnated skin. One fighter managed to slice just beneath Andros’s left eye, nearly gouging it out.

  The momentum of the onslaught pushed the twins back toward the broken moisture door. They looked furious, still intent on capturing Vor and obviously appalled at their failure.

  “We will spill your blood across the sand and dump your bodies—even Shai-Hulud will spit you out,” the Naib shouted to them.

  “You are unworthy opponents,” Andros said with a sneer.

  Vor was determined not to let these people fight for him, but he could not break free. At least eight desert warriors lay broken and probably dead on the cave floor, but the rest showed no sign of backing away, and more came running from the deep tunnels. The brother and sister hesitated as if calculating the odds, then reacted at the same instant, making the same choice.

  Their last glance at Vor was filled with promises and threats. Ignoring the Freemen who had fought them to a standstill, the bloody twins retreated through the moisture lock and vanished like a whiff of steam from a hot rock.

  Naib Sharnak shouted, “Find them. Kill them!” But Vor knew it would be no use. He had no idea if the twins had a vehicle or aircraft, or if they had somehow crossed the desert on their own, but he would not underestimate them.

  The Naib breathed hard, and his voice carried a murderous tone. “I will have satisfactory explanations, Vorian Atreides, or I will have your water.”

  When the warriors released him, Vor calmly faced the tribal leader. Long ago, he had pretended to side with the cymek general so that he could betray him and save humanity. He had taken his father’s preservation canister and dumped the twisted brain out of a high tower, so that it splattered on the frozen cliffs below. After that victory, Vor had thought there would be peace, but obviously the stain of the Titans wasn’t completely eradicated.

  Now, the desert people were outraged and stunned that a mere two opponents could cause so much damage, and Vor realized he needed to tell what he knew. “I’ll give you all the explanations I have, about who I am and what I’ve done in the past, but I doubt they will be enough.”

  There are many journeys in life, but few take you to the brink of death and then bring you back. After such a monumental struggle, you find yourself on a perch that is much, much higher than the one you occupied before.

  —REVEREND MOTHER RAQUELLA BERTO-ANIRUL, SHORTLY AFTER HER TRANSFORMATION

  The poison swirled around her mind like a storm; mental clouds and winds swept away her concentration and attempted to steal her life.

  Abruptly, Dorotea’s body jerked, and her eyes opened wide.

  Through a small pinpoint of awareness, she discovered that she was in a hospital room … in the Sisterhood’s infirmary, she realized, lying on a bed surrounded by medical equipment. She recognized this as the place where the comatose Sisters were kept alive, those who had failed the test to become a Reverend Mother, and yet survived.

  Two women discussed her condition within earshot. Dorotea found she couldn’t move; her body was too weak. She lifted one finger and then another, but that was all she could manage. In a blur, she remembered taking the carefully calibrated poison, then losing control as her body betrayed her, falling to the canopy.

  Valya—was she there, too? Dorotea couldn’t turn her head. The last thing she remembered, in the real world, was seeing the other young woman take the drug.

  And then Dorotea had been lost on a long journey inside herself.

  The medical Sisters still had not noticed her. She blinked again, and found that her consciousness was split, as if her brain had been cracked open and jammed with a new awareness, dominating and overriding what had been there previously. Closing her eyes, she heard voices inside her head, whispering … and all of them sounded female, like a crowd of spectators looking at her from the inside out. The words were faint at first and then so loud and powerful that she could not ignore them. Dorotea felt a sensation of great antiquity there, of ancient women calling to her across vast distances.

  When she focused her concentration on the voices, trying to hear and comprehend, a flood of memories came to her, a vivid part of her experience … yet not from her own lifetime. Ancient women spoke to her, sometimes simultaneously, although she could absorb everything they were saying. The recollections were startling and real, and she began to order them in her mind, realizing that they formed a chain of lives stretching back one generation at a time, all the way into the dim past of human history.

  She saw bloodlines unfolding within her, links in a chain of lives: a woman from centuries ago, Karida Julan on the planet Hagal, who had taken a dashing young military officer as her lover and given birth to a daughter, Helmina Berto-Anirul … who in turn bore a daughter—Raquella Berto-Anirul, the Reverend Mother. And her daughter was Arlett … Dorotea’s mother!

  Raised on Rossak from birth, Dorotea had never known her mother, and saw now throu
gh ricocheting displaced memories that Sister Arlett had been cast out after giving birth to her, dispatched to wander the scattered worlds and recruit acolytes for the Sisterhood. In all those years, she had not been allowed to return to the Rossak School, to her daughter. Where was she now? Dorotea was not certain.

  But Raquella was here at the school … Dorotea’s grandmother! The Reverend Mother had never said a word of it, never acknowledged her. And soon Dorotea saw more from the past and learned things she didn’t want to know.

  Like an image in a distorted mirror, she watched the separation and abandonment of the baby daughter—herself—from two different sides. A distraught Arlett begging to raise and love the little girl, and the stern Raquella insisting that such connections could not be permitted. All Sisters should be trained as equals as part of the larger community, she said, without the distractions of family ties. Arlett had to abandon her baby, Raquella had to brush her aside, and Dorotea had to spend her life in complete ignorance of the truth.

  Yes, she saw it in her new library of memories. The Reverend Mother had torn them apart. Through the sudden infusion of information, Dorotea realized the far-reaching implications, saw the extent of what Raquella had done. Because of her conflict with Arlett, all of the babies in the nursery had been switched, and their names removed so that the girls were merely “daughters of the Sisterhood.”

  But even more came rushing to her. The distant sound of the other memories again increased to a roar. She met generations and generations of women who had lived across the thousand years of thinking-machine rule, the depredations of independent robots and combat meks, the enslavement of whole populations. For years, Dorotea had lived on Lampadas, assigned to observe the Butlerians and coolly analyze their movement. There she had heard the truth and the passion, and she had come to believe in the dangers of unchecked progress. As she had improved herself with Sisterhood techniques, Dorotea had become more and more convinced that human beings did not need the crutch of computers and advanced technology, because every person had the innate abilities they required.

  So many lives were inside her mind now, so much suffering in the time preceding her … it only reinforced what she already believed. The female voices all shouted to her at once in a tumult that gradually faded until one voice emerged: Raquella Berto-Anirul, at a much younger age more than eight decades ago, just before the Battle of Corrin.

  Now Dorotea saw horrific memories, the painful epidemic that had raged across Parmentier, how Raquella and Mohandas Suk had fought to save as many people as they could … how she had come to Rossak to help the surviving Sorceresses against the spreading disease. In a snapshot inside her head, Dorotea saw bodies in white robes and black, stacked inside the cave cities. Dorotea saw what Raquella had seen as she walked up the switchback cliffside trail, ascending toward the high caves where the Sorceresses kept their breeding records.

  Raquella’s memories were Dorotea’s own memories now. She saw through her grandmother’s eyes as she studied the comprehensive catalogs of billions of bloodlines the Sorceresses had compiled for generations, records taken from a swath across the human race.

  And preserved in banks of forbidden computers! Collecting and processing data, making projections and completing reports for the women to read.

  Dorotea wanted to scream out in protest, but she could only watch in horror. For all the years she had served on Lampadas, accompanying Manford Torondo as he gave impassioned speeches to restless crowds, she had felt the truth of the man’s crusade. She had been proud of the Sisterhood, how the women used their own abilities to achieve physical and mental superiority.

  And now Dorotea knew that the Sisters relied on the crutch of thinking machines after all—exactly the insidious temptation against which Manford so passionately warned. The Sisterhood touted itself as a champion of human potential, but now, having seen through the eyes of her grandmother, her idealistic beliefs were dashed.

  There were indeed illegal computers hidden somewhere in the cave city.

  Fully awake now, Dorotea caught her breath, numbed by the avalanche of revelations. Lying on her back, returning to herself, she stared up at the white ceiling of the infirmary and let the ramifications sink in.

  The Sisterhood possessed forbidden computers.

  Reverend Mother Raquella was her grandmother.

  And I am a Reverend Mother now! Dorotea had survived the agony that had killed so many of her Sisters. That understanding was the most potent of all.

  She was also much younger and stronger than her grandmother. Dorotea decided that she must do something to bring about a major shift in the Sisterhood. She could challenge Raquella and force her to reveal the computers, but not until she had enough allies. Knowing that the thinking machines were hidden somewhere up in the restricted caves, and that Sister Ingrid had fallen from the steep trail, she could guess what must have happened.

  Her new knowledge was dangerous, and she was weak and vulnerable. With Reverend Mother Raquella gone to the Suk School, Dorotea still had a little time to plan.

  She concentrated on the quiet room, listening to the faint sounds around her and attuned to the new awareness inside her head, a focus that also allowed her to travel into the microscopic cellular building blocks of her body. Her pumping heart, the alveolar exchange of oxygen inside her lungs, the chemical processes within her organs, the transfer of nerve impulses in her brain. She was living in a universe of herself. No wonder the Reverend Mother wanted other Sisters to experience this.

  As she assessed her internal cells, her metabolism, her muscle fibers, Dorotea studied her body like a starship pilot completing a thorough rundown, making adjustments as needed. When she had completed the task, pronouncing herself healthy and whole, she finally opened her eyes again and sat up.

  She looked around the quiet infirmary, blinking. What had happened to Valya? She did not see her nearby, but she had watched the other Sister take the pill. So many volunteers had died in attempting the chemical passage—had Valya failed? She hoped not.

  On the other side of the infirmary, the two medical Sisters saw her move, and turned to stare at her in astonishment. They ran to Dorotea, calling out for help. Dorotea just sat there and smiled, letting them fuss over her and ask countless questions. So far, she felt fine.

  To play the game of life well, compare it to chess, considering the second- and third-level consequences of every action.

  —GILBERTUS ALBANS, REFLECTIONS IN THE MIRROR OF THE MIND

  The Discussion Chamber was one of the Mentat School’s largest classrooms, an auditorium with dark-stained walls covered in statesmanlike images of the greatest debaters in human history, ranging from famous ancient orators of Old Earth, such as Marcus Cicero and Abraham Lincoln, to Tlaloc who had instigated the Time of Titans, to speakers from recent centuries, such as Renata Thew and the unparalleled Novan al-Jones. When educating Gilbertus on Corrin, Erasmus had made sure his young protégé was familiar with the very best.

  In an anteroom, Gilbertus reviewed his notes for the risky discussion he intended to lead, then made his way out onto the stage. With fifteen of his best students already undergoing battlefield tactical training—in accordance with Manford Torondo’s request—Gilbertus felt obligated to provide at least some level of mitigation, a voice of reason. He wanted the students to ponder the implications … but would they listen?

  As he reached the podium, the classroom fell silent out of respect for the Headmaster. “Today’s lesson deviates from our usual form of tactical training. We will be taking a different approach, a change of pace.”

  These were the best of his current class of Mentat trainees, hand-selected for their analytical prowess—and Manford was demanding their services for his crusade. Gilbertus never voiced his resentment at being forced to sacrifice such talented students in a cause to which he was fundamentally, and secretly, opposed.

  “A crucial component of designing a successful strategy is learning to think like your enem
y. This is not a natural goal: It must be practiced, and some of you may find it a difficult and extremely uncomfortable challenge. Therefore, we will debate the merits of both sides of a key issue, to help you explore the mindset of the opposing side. We will discuss the merits of thinking machines.” After an audible gasp or two, the students seemed to hold their breath. He paused, noting their intent expressions, then spoke in a clear voice. “Consider the postulation that thinking machines, in some properly restricted forms, may play a safe and useful role in human society.”

  This elicited some murmurs of surprise, and angry glances from the students that Manford Torondo had sent to the school.

  Gilbertus gave a slight smile. “With so many of you about to join the Butlerian ships, it is appropriate to think about what you’re fighting for, and what you’re fighting against. Out there, you will clash with the Machine Apologists, planetary leaders who sincerely believe they can put thinking machines to good use and keep them under control.” All the students were interested, though their uneasiness was palpable in the air.

  He made his own choice, a redheaded young woman seated in the middle; he had planned this debate with her in mind. “Alys Carroll, you will be my opponent. I look forward to a skilled, spirited discussion.”

  She rose to her feet and walked toward the stage, straight-backed and determined. Gilbertus said to the entire class, “I will argue one side of the issue, and Alys Carroll will support the opposite point of view.” He removed a bright, gold Imperial coin from his pocket. One side bore the image of Serena Butler, and the other the open hand of the Landsraad League. “Heads, and Alys will argue on the side of the thinking machines as a Machine Apologist. Tails, and I will take that side instead.”