His subterranean base was five hundred meters beneath the frozen tundra of the North Canadian Territory, in an out-of-the-way region. Earlier in the day he had performed last-minute military exercises underground, by digging and restoring vanishing tunnels over a large area, like an army of high-tech moles. During the maneuvers, he’d surfaced twice with the electronically veiled assault vehicles to carry out simulated attacks against mock-GSA facilities—destroying rock formations that had stood for millions of years.
It all went satisfactorily, and he’d gone back underground afterward, closing up both tunnels behind him. Or so he thought. Unknown to him, a technical problem had caused one of the tunnel doors to remain ajar—just a little, and no one was monitoring the security system, so he was not made aware of the problem. The lapse could not have come at a worse possible time for this man who’d been having so much trouble getting his attack force online.…
Shortly before the military exercises, he had been in his underground office monitoring strange radio reports of a monstrous weather system crossing the Atlantic Ocean at a very high velocity. One newscast he’d been listening to had broken off when the reporter was in midsentence. He’d tried to find another satellite station, but unknown to him, he was running out of time.…
Now he was back at the radio, searching for more information on the weather, but all he got was static—no news reports of any kind. Perplexed, Bane switched off the radio and leaned back in his chair to think. Then he heard something, a dull roar at first that became louder and louder, and he felt a vibration in the floor and walls that knocked him off his chair. The radio, his personal weapons, and other objects in the office tumbled on top of him or slid toward him, and he tried to protect himself by crawling under the desk. But it was moving, too.
When the Splitter blast came, it chewed up dirt and rocks around the partially open tunnel entrance and ripped the heavy door off completely, sucking it into a whirlwind that melted it into its basic elements. Within seconds, the storm surged down into the tunnel and cut through the voleer machines in the subterranean base, disintegrating and transforming them into primal goo, then surging full force into the other tunnel door, blasting that one away, too.
Bane’s office, though, was accessed via a side tunnel, and he had closed a series of thick alloy doors behind him to get there. Miraculously, those doors held, and he survived. But when he emerged and saw the destruction, he wished he’d been killed in the blast.
* * *
SOUTH OF BANE’S base, the powerful Splitter blast approached the Rocky Mountain Territory.…
In the Missoula Reservation, Jade Ridell left a medical clinic, deep in thought as she walked in the direction of her apartment building. The doctor had confirmed a suspicion she’d been having that she was pregnant, and he’d asked her if she wanted to report to a family guidance center to have the baby aborted. No, she’d told him, her voice filled with emotion. It was Chairman Rahma’s baby, and she intended to keep it. At least she would have that part of the man she cared about so much.
She rounded a corner, felt a brisk wind, and tightened the collar of her coat. Her apartment building was in view now, a glass-walled tower. Since leaving the game reserve she’d worked in a gentleman’s club, wearing skimpy outfits and waiting on tables. A lot of men showed interest in her, but she didn’t give them any encouragement. She had not recovered from the severe shock of being sent away by the Chairman, and of losing her entire family. There had been no word from her parents, and she was terribly worried, especially missing her little sister, Willow. The two of them used to sit and talk for hours, sharing special times. Now Jade didn’t know if she would ever see her again, or their parents.
Hearing a roar, more than the normal street noise, she looked around, but saw nothing. The sound increased, and the sky darkened ominously.…
* * *
FOR SEVERAL SECONDS Artie heard the blast chewing through techplex, alloy, and everything else, getting louder and louder. Presently the noise level dropped off completely, and again it was quiet, but for only a few minutes before he heard another roar, like that of a great wind. The roar increased and then passed quickly, leaving stillness behind.
Now the glidewolf climbed over debris and made it out into the corridor, bringing her passengers along. Walls were partially caved in, and the slidewalk lay in ruins, but the animal climbed nimbly over more debris piles and found enough airspace to soar out toward the extinct animal habitats.
There were no longer double doors separating this area from the corridor, and where numerous resurrected animal species had once lived, only a deep, storm-scoured hole remained in the dirt, with a faint green cast to the surface where it had been reseeded. To Artie’s simulated senses, the air smelled musty, and humid.
Moving her wings only slightly and perhaps catching a draft of air that Artie did not notice, the animal soared up and out of the hole. The sky was a peculiar shade of gray-blue, darker to the west where Artie assumed that splitting and greenforming blasts were continuing their course across the American continents. Though it should still be daylight now, he saw no sign of the sun and the illumination was low, as if the valley didn’t know whether it was day or night.
The glidewolf circled over the strange green-seeded landscape, which had been scoured of all plants, along with the administration, medical, and other yurts, the greenhouses and aviaries, the shrine, the soarplane field, and all roads leading in and out of the game reserve. Artie thought a few animals might have survived; animals sensed things, and some would have attempted to find cover wherever they could before the cataclysm—inside caves or burrows, or in low, sheltered spots of terrain. He could only hope. Everywhere he looked the ground was barren and faintly green, and the seeds would germinate quickly, so that in a matter of weeks the entire area would look much as it might have millions and millions of years ago. He thought of birds, and worried about them. Where could they have hidden? He saw none flying, and nothing moving on the ground, either.
As the glidewolf flew across the valley, Artie looked down where the ruins of a small, remote town had once been, having been emptied by the Green Revolution but not yet visited by a Janus Machine crew. Now none of that was necessary, because the site was gelatinous, completely smoothed over. Soon it would all be covered with vegetation, as if man had never made any mark there.
Standing inside the pouch of the glidewolf with her head out, Valerie Tatanka stared ahead, her black hair blowing in the cool air. She had tucked Rahma’s body down into the pouch, forming a lump that was visible now, between her and the hubot. She still had a copy of the Chairman’s great book with her; Artie had seen it moments ago.
On his internal sensors, he noted that the marsupial wolf was setting course in a westerly direction, following the track of the twin storms, somehow staying aloft on currents of wind, without the necessity of climbing trees and relaunching herself. There were no trees on the blasted landscape below—only a sea of green seeds. He didn’t know where the wolf was going, or how long it would take to get there. Artie’s internal programs told him nothing; he found himself unable to calculate any probabilities.
Clinging to the edge of the pouch under the soaring creature, the hubot wished he could communicate better with her, that he could understand her better. Previously their connection had been on a fundamental level, as lab manager to lab animal, with him creating her in the first place, and then providing her with the basic necessities for her survival.
But all of that was in the past, and she seemed to have evolved in front of his eyes, changing in incomprehensible ways. Without a doubt, the creature was extremely intelligent, possessing mental and sensory skills that he could hardly imagine.
It was as Rahma had always told him: animals were not lower life-forms, and were in fact superior to humans. “Count the ways,” the bearded guru used to say.
Now the Chairman was limp and dead between the hubot and the doctor, and the glidewolf who had taken it upon hers
elf to protect Rahma was transporting his body someplace far away. To recycle it, presumably, as the illustrious environmentalist would have wanted. But why had she included Artie and Valerie, and where were they going?
* * *
DEEP BENEATH HIS mansion in the Berkeley hills, Arch Ondex stood by himself in a bunker, watching monitors and listening to the electronic chatter of robots around him as they performed their duties at workstations, coordinating with robots in other SciO and GSA bunkers around the country. The NDS had gone offline some time ago, and no one knew why. His own operation was relying on other communication links that continued to function.
In the past hour, the huge black and green clouds had passed over the east coast and the Midwest, breaching three of the GSA fortifications and one SciO bunker—or at least that was the assumption, because all communications had been cut off with those facilities. Thirty-four other SciO bunkers had weathered the storm, and even more GSA bunkers. After several minutes of communication delay, those stations were all operational again, reporting that everything on the surface of the ground above them had been completely erased.
There had been no word at all from the Montana Valley Game Reserve, so Ondex wondered what had happened there, and if he would ever see the Chairman again, a man he considered to be his friend despite their differences. A feeling of great sadness enveloped him. So much was being lost.
As the SciO leader waited, he knew there were very few options left for him, and none of them was appealing.…
* * *
AN OMINOUS BLACK cloud approached Joss and his companions, beginning to darken the sky like volcanic ash. From his sentinel position in front of the gnarled old oak tree, he heard an eerie, horrendous sound—violence on an immense, unprecedented scale.
He lifted his hands in the air, holding the force field in place to protect the people around him, extending outward for thousands of meters into the forest. He saw the hazy faces and forms of Evana, Kupi, and the others on the trunks of the trees in their fused state, saw the barely perceptible pulsing of the bark on the trunks as the hybrids breathed in unison with him and with one another, as if all of them were a single, linked organism.
With the energy net woven around them to form a sheltered cocoon, Joss looked through the mesh and watched a massive black cloud streak over the land at ground level, destroying everything outside his sheltered area but passing over him with hardly any effect, just a little buffeting of the force field.
The sky became dusty blue afterward. Joss waited for several long minutes, then held position while an immense green cloud swept over the ground, going around the protective cocoon like a great tinted wind, raining sparkles of green and making musical sounds that were not unpleasant to the ears. Again, Joss’s shelter survived, and he saw the hybrid trees still breathing. They remained linked to him.
The entire event had been like splitting and greenforming, but on an unprecedented scale. What had happened?
An hour passed in which he waited and wondered. Inside the protected zone he heard a few forest animals and birds moving about tentatively, not knowing or understanding what had occurred. He could only imagine how still and lifeless it must be beyond … or were seeds already germinating out there? He released the protective force field, watched the strands dissipate.
In the distance he thought he saw something flying, but it was only a momentary, flickering vision, and when he stared hard in that direction he saw nothing, nothing at all. It must be a trick of light, he decided, or his hopeful mind contriving something that was not there, like a mirage in the air. The dreadful truth weighed heavily on him.
Not many have survived this, he thought. We are among the few.
Though he knew there had been widespread death, Joss Stuart felt an odd sense of peace and acceptance, that this marked a new beginning for life on Earth.
By himself, he entered the largest cedar in the rescued forest, a magnificent and stately tree that towered over the others. It was centuries old, with wide, spreading boughs that arched upward, and deep green needles. Sliding through the sleek, pale greenness of the trunk’s interior to the topmost portion, he gazed out in all directions over a faint green, blasted landscape, extending far, far beyond the small area of trees and inhabitants he had saved.
Tenderly he gazed down at the oak that sheltered his cherished Evana, with her face and form on the trunk, and he saw the branches of her tree sway gracefully, in recognition of his attention. She was his mortal human love, which he retained as an important link to what he used to be, a much less complex version of what he had become today, and what he was evolving toward. On this momentous journey he would lead Evana and the others, and they would learn from one another how best to care for one another, and for the new world that had been bestowed upon them.
He felt the great cedar speaking to him wordlessly, with thoughts drifting through his consciousness from a more intelligent sentience than he’d ever encountered before or even imagined, linked to all living things on the planet.
Joss received a flow of information so quickly that he found it difficult to absorb everything. But it was a learning experience for him, and as moments passed, he was able to bring himself into synchronization with the wordless data being sent to him in a way that his human mind could never have absorbed previously, nor could any computer.
Gradually he understood, and realized that the immense catastrophe had a purpose, a reason for occurring. The plants and animals of Earth would regenerate—not all of them, but a substantial number. He learned that higher-state humans of the future would need links to trees in order to live, would have to regularly recharge themselves inside trees, a symbiosis of plants and humans. There would be a new way of traveling for humankind, using green, earth-rooted life-forms along the way, renewing strength inside them and communicating with them as brethren. It was all part of the process of enhanced evolution for mankind, the only path left open to them for their survival.
People cannot live without trees, he thought. Humans had only an inkling of this in the past, never realizing the form this relationship would need to take.
These were the great cedar’s thoughts, and now they were his own as well.
Other Books
By Brian Herbert and Jan Herbert
Ocean
By Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
Dune: House Atreides
Dune: House Harkonnen
Dune: House Corrino
Dune: The Butlerian Jihad
Dune: The Machine Crusade
Dune: The Battle of Corrin
Hunters of Dune
Sandworms of Dune
Paul of Dune
The Winds of Dune
Sisterhood of Dune
Mentats of Dune
Hellhole
Hellhole: Awakening
Hellhole: Inferno*
By Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson
The Road to Dune
(includes the original short novel Spice Planet)
By Brian Herbert
Dreamer of Dune
(biography of Frank Herbert)
*forthcoming
About the Author
Brian Herbert, the son of Frank Herbert, is the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers. He has won several literary honors and has been nominated for the highest awards in science fiction. In 2003, he published Dreamer of Dune, a moving biography of his father that was a Hugo Award finalist. His acclaimed novels include Sidney’s Comet; Sudanna, Sudanna; The Race for God; Timeweb; The Stolen Gospels; and Man of Two Worlds (written with Frank Herbert), in addition to the Hellhole Trilogy and twelve Dune-series novels coauthored with Kevin J. Anderson. In 2013, Brian published Ocean, an epic fantasy novel about ocean environmental issues (coauthored with his wife, Jan).
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2014 by DreamStar, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Stephen Youll
A Tor Book
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-3254-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-5605-9 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466856059
First Edition: July 2014
The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma Page 35
