Frank Herbert - Dune Book 5 - Heretics of Dune

by Frank Herbert

  Momentarily, she reflected on the inherent weakness of the siege mentality that such defenses represented. Teg had been right about them. Mobility was the key to military success but she doubted that he had meant mobility on foot.

  There were no easy hiding places on the snow-whitened slope and Lucilla felt Burzmali's nervousness. What could they do here if someone came? A snow-covered depression led down from their position to the left, angling toward the community. It was not a road but she thought it might be a path.

  "Down this way," Burzmali said, leading them into the depression.

  The snow came up to their calves.

  "I hope these people are trustworthy," she said.

  "They hate the Honored Matres," he said. "That's enough for me."

  "The ghola had better be there!" She held back an even more angry response but could not keep herself from adding: "Their hatred isn't enough for me."

  It was better to expect the worst, she thought.

  She had come to a reassuring thought about Burzmali, though. He was like Teg. Neither of them pursued a course that would lead them into a dead end -- not if they could help it. She suspected there were support forces concealed in the bushes around them even now.

  The snow-covered trail ended in a paved pathway, gently curved inward from the edges and kept free of snow by a melt system. There was a trickle of dampness in the center. Lucilla was several steps onto this path before she recognized what it must be -- a magchute. It was an ancient magnetic transport base that once had carried goods or raw materials to a pre-Scattering factory.

  "It gets steeper here," Burzmali warned her. "They've carved steps in it but watch it. They're not very deep."

  They came presently to the end of the magchute. It stopped at a decrepit wall -- local brick atop a plasteel foundation. The faint light of stars in a clearing sky revealed crude workmanship in the bricks -- typical Famine-Times construction. The wall was a mass of vines and mottled fungus. The growth did little to conceal the cracked courses of the bricks and the crude efforts to fill chinks with mortar. A single row of narrow windows looked down onto the place where the magchute debouched into a mass of bushes and weeds. Three of the windows glowed electric blue with some inner activity that was accompanied by faint crackling sounds.

  "This was a factory in the old days," Burzmali said.

  "I have eyes and a memory," Lucilla snapped. Did this grunting male think her completely devoid of intelligence?

  Something creaked dismally off to their left. A patch of sod and weeds lifted atop a cellar door accompanied by an upward glow of brilliant yellow light.

  "Quick!" Burzmali led her at a swift run across thick vegetation and down a flight of steps exposed by the lifting door. The door creaked closed behind them in a grumbling of machinery.

  Lucilla found herself in a large space with a low ceiling. Light came from long lines of modern glowglobes strung along massive plasteel girders overhead. The floor was swept clean but showed scratches and indentations of activity, the locations no doubt of bygone machinery. She glimpsed movement far off across the open space. A young woman in a version of Lucilla's dragon robe trotted toward them.

  Lucilla sniffed. There was a stink of acid in the room and undertones of something foul.

  "This was a Harkonnen factory," Burzmali said. "I wonder what they made here?"

  The young woman stopped in front of Lucilla. She had a willowy figure, elegant in shape and motion under the clinging robe. A subcutaneous glow came from her face. It spoke of exercise and good health. The green eyes, though, were hard and chilling in the way they measured everything they saw.

  "So they sent more than one of us to watch this place," she said.

  Lucilla put out a restraining hand as Burzmali started to respond. This woman was not what she seemed. No more than I am! Lucilla chose her words carefully. "We always know each other, it seems."

  The young woman smiled. "I watched your approach. I could not believe my eyes." She swept a sneering glance across Burzmali. "This was supposed to be a customer?"

  "And guide," Lucilla said. She noted the puzzlement on Burzmali's face and prayed he would not ask the wrong question. This young woman was danger!

  "Weren't we expected?" Burzmali asked.

  "Ahhhh, it speaks," the young woman said, laughing. Her laugh was as cold as her eyes.

  "I prefer that you do not refer to me as 'it,' " Burzmali said.

  "I call Gammu scum anything I wish," the young woman said. "Don't speak to me of your preferences!"

  "What did you call me?" Burzmali was tired and his anger came boiling up at this unexpected attack.

  "I call you anything I choose, scum!"

  Burzmali had suffered enough. Before Lucilla could stop him, he uttered a low growl and aimed a heavy slap at the young woman.

  The blow did not land.

  Lucilla watched in fascination as the woman dropped under the attack, caught Burzmali's sleeve as one might catch a bit of fabric blowing in the wind and, in a blindingly fast pirouette whose speed almost hid its delicacy, sent Burzmali skidding across the floor. The woman dropped to a half crouch on one foot, the other prepared to kick.

  "I shall kill him now," she said.

  Lucilla, not knowing what might happen next, folded her body sideways, barely avoiding the woman's suddenly outthrust foot, and countered with a standard Bene Gesserit sabard that dumped the young woman on her back doubled up where the blow had caught her in the abdomen.

  "A suggestion that you kill my guide is uncalled for, whatever your name is," Lucilla said.

  The young woman gasped for breath, then, panting between words: "I am called Murbella, Great Honored Matre. You shame me by defeating me with such a slow attack. Why do you do that?"

  "You needed a lesson," Lucilla said.

  "I am only newly robed, Great Honored Matre. Please forgive me. I thank you for the splendid lesson and will thank you every time I employ your response, which I now commit to memory." She bowed her head, then leaped lightly to her feet, an impish grin on her face.

  In her coldest voice, Lucilla asked: "Do you know who I am?" Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw Burzmali regain his feet with painful slowness. He remained at one side, watching the women, but anger burned his face.

  "From your ability to teach me that lesson, I see that you are who you are, Great Honored Matre. Am I forgiven?" The impish grin had vanished from Murbella's face. She stood with head bowed.

  "You are forgiven. Is there a no-ship coming?"

  "So they say here. We are prepared for it." Murbella glanced at Burzmali.

  "He is still useful to me and it is required that he accompany me," Lucilla said.

  "Very good, Great Honored Matre. Does your forgiveness include your name?"

  "No!"

  Murbella sighed. "We have captured the ghola," she said. "He came as a Tleilaxu from the south. I was just about to bed him when you arrived."

  Burzmali hobbled toward them. Lucilla saw that he had recognized the danger. This "completely safe" place had been infested by enemies! But the enemies still knew very little.

  "The ghola was not injured?" Burzmali asked.

  "It still speaks," Murbella said. "How odd."

  "You will not bed the ghola," Lucilla said. "That one is my special charge!"

  "Fair game, Great Honored Matre. And I marked him first. He is already partly subdued."

  She laughed once more, with a callous abandonment that shocked Lucilla. "This way. There is a place where you can watch."

  May you die on Caladan!

  -Ancient Drinking Toast

  Duncan tried to remember where he was. He knew Tormsa was dead. Blood had spurted from Tormsa's eyes. Yes, he remembered that clearly. They had entered a dark building and light had flared abruptly all around them. Duncan felt an ache in the back of his head. A blow? He tried to move and his muscles refused to obey.

  He remembered sitting at the edge of a wide lawn. There was some kind of
bowling game in progress -- eccentric balls that bounced and darted with no apparent design. The players were young men in a common costume of . . . Giedi Prime!

  "They are practicing to be old men," he said. He remembered saying that.

  His companion, a young woman, looked at him blankly.

  "Only old men should play these outdoor games," he said.

  "Oh?"

  It was an unanswerable question. She put him down with only the simplest of verbal gestures.

  And betrayed me the next instant to the Harkonnens!

  So that was a pre-ghola memory.

  Ghola!

  He remembered the Bene Gesserit Keep on Gammu. The library: holophotos and triphotos of the Atreides Duke, Leto I. Teg's resemblance was not an accident: a bit taller but otherwise it was all there -- that long, thin face with its high-bridged nose, the renowned Atreides charisma . . .

  Teg!

  He remembered the old Bashar's last gallant stand in the Gammu night.

  Where am I?

  Tormsa had brought him here. They had been moving along an overgrown track on the outskirts of Ysai. Barony. It started to snow before they were two hundred meters up the track. Wet snow that clung to them. Cold, miserable snow that set their teeth chattering within a minute. They paused to bring up their hoods and close the insulated jackets. That was better. But it would be night soon. Much colder.

  "There is a shelter of sorts up ahead," Tormsa said. "We will wait there for the night."

  When Duncan did not speak, Tormsa said: "It won't be warm but it will be dry."

  Duncan saw the gray outline of the place in about three hundred paces. It stood out against the dirty snow some two stories tall. He recognized it immediately: a Harkonnen counting outpost. Observers here had counted (and sometimes killed) the people who passed. It was built of native dirt turned into one giant brick by the simple expedient of preforming it in mud bricks and then superheating it with a wide-bore burner, the kind the Harkonnens had used to control mobs.

  As they came up to it, Duncan saw the remains of a full-field defensive screen with fire-lance gaps aimed at the approaches. Someone had smashed the system a long time ago. Twisted holes in the field net were partly overgrown with bushes. But the fire-lance gaps remained open. Oh, yes -- to allow people inside a view of the approaches.

  Tormsa paused and listened, studying their surroundings with care.

  Duncan looked at the counting station. He remembered them well. What confronted him was a thing that had sprouted like a deformed growth from an original tubular seed. The surface had been baked to a glassine finish. Warts and protrusions betrayed where it had been superheated. The erosion of eons had left fine scratches in it but the original shape remained. He looked upward and identified part of the old suspensor lift system. Someone had jury-rigged a block and tackle to the outbar.

  So the opening through the full-field screen was of recent making.

  Tormsa disappeared into this opening.

  As though a switch had been thrown, Duncan's memory vision changed. He was in the no-globe's library with Teg. The projector was producing a series of views through modern Ysai. The idea of modern took on an odd overtone for him. Barony had been a modern city, if you thought of modern as meaning technologically usiform up to the norms of its time. It had relied exclusively on suspensor guide-beams for transport of people and material -- all of them high up. No ground-level openings. He was explaining this to Teg.

  The plan translated physically into a city that used every possible square meter of vertical and horizontal space for things other than movement of goods and humans. The guide-beam openings required only enough head room and elbow room for the universal transport pods.

  Teg spoke: "The ideal shape would be tubular with a flat top for the 'thopters."

  "The Harkonnens preferred squares and rectangles."

  That was true.

  Duncan remembered Barony with a clearness that made him shiver. Suspensor tracks shot through it like worm holes -- straight, curved, flipping off at oblique angles . . . up, down, sideways. Except for the rectangular absolute imposed by Harkonnen whim, Barony was built to a particular population-design criterion: maximum stuffing with minimum expenditure of materials.

  "The flat top was the only human-oriented space in the damned thing!" He remembered telling that to Teg and Lucilla both.

  Up there on top were penthouses, guard stations at all the edges, at the 'thopter pads, at all the entries from below, around all of the parks. People living on the top could forget about the mass of flesh squirming in close proximity just below them. No smell or noise from that jumble was allowed on top. Servants were forced to bathe and change into sanitary clothing before emerging.

  Teg had a question: "Why did that massed humanity permit itself to live in such a crush?"

  The answer was obvious and he explained it. The outside was a dangerous place. The city's managers made it appear even more dangerous than it actually was. Besides, few in there knew anything about a better life Outside. The only better life they knew about was on top. And the only way up there was through an absolutely abasing servility.

  "It will happen and there's nothing you can do about it!"

  That was another voice echoing in Duncan's skull. He heard it clearly.

  Paul!

  How odd it was, Duncan thought. There was an arrogance in the prescient like the arrogance of the Mentat seated in his most brittle logic.

  I never before thought of Paul as arrogant.

  Duncan stared at his own face in a mirror. He realized with part of his mind that this was a pre-ghola memory. Abruptly, it was another mirror, his own face but different. That darkly rounded face had begun to shape into the harsher lines it could have if it matured. He looked into his own eyes. Yes, those were his eyes. He had heard someone describe his eyes once as "cave sitters." They were deeply inset under the brows and riding atop high cheeks. He had been told it was difficult to determine if his eyes were dark blue or dark green unless the light were just right.

  A woman said that. He could not remember the woman.

  He tried to reach up and touch his hair but his hands would not obey. He remembered then that his hair had been bleached. Who did that? An old woman. His hair was no longer a cap of dark ringlets.

  There was the Duke Leto staring at him in the doorway to the dining room on Caladan.

  "We will eat now," the Duke said. It was a royal command saved from arrogance by a faint grin that said: "Somebody had to say it."

  What is happening to my mind?

  He remembered following Tormsa to the place where Tormsa said the no-ship would meet them.

  It was a large building bulking in the night. There were several smaller outbuildings below the larger structure. They appeared to be occupied. Voices and machine sounds could be heard in them. No faces showed at the narrow windows. No door opened. Duncan smelled cooking as they passed the larger of the outbuildings. This reminded him that they had only eaten dry strips of leathery stuff that Tormsa called "travel food" that day.

  They entered the dark building.

  Light flared.

  Tormsa's eyes exploded in blood.

  Darkness.

  Duncan looked at a woman's face. He had seen a face like this one before: a single tride taken from a longer holo sequence. Where was that? Where had he seen that? It was an almost oval face with just a small widening at the brow to mar its curved perfection.

  She spoke: "My name is Murbella. You will not remember that but I share it now as I mark you. I have selected you."

  I do remember you, Murbella.

  Green eyes set wide under arched brows gave her features a focal region that left chin and small mouth for later examination. The mouth was full-lipped and he knew it could become pouting in repose.

  The green eyes stared into his eyes. How cold that look. The power in it.

  Something touched his cheek.

  He opened his eyes. This was no memory!
This was happening to him. It was happening now!

  Murbella! She had been here and she had left him. Now she was back. He remembered awakening naked on a soft surface . . . a sleeping pad. His hands recognized it. Murbella unclothed just above him, green eyes staring at him with a terrible intensity. She touched him simultaneously in many places. A soft humming issued from between her lips.