Heretics of Dune dc-5

by Frank Herbert

  Ambitorm went to the back of the declivity and carefully removed a layer of icy dirt and several flat rocks, which concealed a small pit. He lifted a round black object from the pit and busied himself over it.

  Duncan squatted under the overhang and studied his guide. Ambitorm had a dished-in face with skin like dark brown leather. Yes, those could be the features of a Face Dancer. Deep creases cut into the skin at the edges of the man's brown eyes. Creases radiated from the sides of the thin mouth and lined the wide brow. They spread out beside the flat nose and deepened the cleft of a narrow chin. Creases of time all over his face.

  Appetizing odors began to arise from the black object in front of Ambitorm.

  "We will eat here and wait a bit before we continue," Ambitorm said.

  He spoke Old Galach but with that guttural accent which Duncan had never heard before, an odd stress on adjacent vowels. Was Ambitorm from the Scattering or a Gammu native? There obviously had been many linguistic drifts since the Dune days of Muad'dib. For that matter, Duncan recognized that all of the people in the Gammu Keep, including Teg and Lucilla, spoke a Galach that had shifted from the one he had learned as a pre-ghola child.

  "Ambitorm," Duncan said. "Is that a Gammu name?"

  "You will call me Tormsa," the guide said.

  "Is that a nickname?"

  "It is what you will call me."

  "Why did those people back there call you Ambitorm."

  "That was the name I gave them."

  "But why would you..."

  "You lived under the Harkonnens and you did not learn how to change your identity?"

  Duncan fell silent. Was that it? Another disguise. Ambi... Tormsa had not changed his appearance. Tormsa. Was it a Tleilaxu name?

  The guide extended a steaming cup toward Duncan. "A drink to restore you, Wose. Drink it fast. It will keep you warm."

  Duncan closed both hands around the cup. Wose. Wose and Tormsa. Tleilaxu Master and his Face Dancer companion.

  Duncan lifted the cup toward Tormsa in the ancient gesture of Atreides battle comrades, then put it to his lips. Hot! But it warmed him as it went down. The drink had a faintly sweet flavor over some vegetable tang. He blew on it and drank it down as he saw Tormsa was doing.

  Odd that I should not suspect poison or some drug, Duncan thought. But this Tormsa and the others last night had something of the Bashar about them. The gesture to a battle comrade had come naturally.

  "Why are you risking your life this way?" Duncan asked.

  "You know the Bashar and you have to ask?"

  Duncan fell silent, abashed.

  Tormsa leaned forward and recovered Duncan's cup. Soon, all evidence of their breakfast lay hidden under the concealing rocks and dirt.

  That food spoke of careful planning, Duncan thought. He turned and squatted on the cold ground. The mist was still out there beyond the screening bushes. Leafless limbs cut the view into odd bits and pieces. As he watched, the mist began to lift, revealing the blurred outlines of a city at the far edge of the valley.

  Tormsa squatted beside him. "Very old city," he said. "Harkonnen place. Look." He passed a small monoscope to Duncan. "That is where we go tonight."

  Duncan put the monoscope to his left eye and tried to focus the oil lens. The controls felt unfamiliar, not at all like those he had learned as a pre-ghola youth or had been taught at the Keep. He removed it from his eye and examined it.

  "Ixian?" he asked.

  "No. We made it." Tormsa reached over and pointed out two tiny buttons raised above the black tube. "Slow, fast. Push left to cycle out, right to cycle back."

  Again, Duncan lifted the scope to his eye.

  Who were the we who had made this thing?

  A touch of the fast button and the view leaped into his gaze. Tiny dots moved in the city. People! He increased the amplification. The people became small dolls. With them to give him scale, Duncan realized that the city at the valley's edge was immense... and farther away than he had thought. A single rectangular structure stood in the center of the city, its top lost in the clouds. Gigantic.

  Duncan knew this place now. The surroundings had changed but that central structure lay fixed in his memory.

  How many of us vanished into that black hellhole and never returned?

  "Nine hundred and fifty stories," Tormsa said, seeing where Duncan's gaze was directed. "Forty-five kilometers long, thirty kilometers wide. Plasteel and armor-plaz, all of it."

  "I know." Duncan lowered the scope and returned it to Tormsa. "It was called Barony."

  "Ysai," Tormsa said.

  "That's what they call it now," Duncan said. "I have some different names for it."

  Duncan took a deep breath to put down the old hatreds. Those people were all dead. Only the building remained. And the memories. He scanned the city around that enormous structure. The place was a sprawling mass of warrens. Green spaces lay scattered throughout, each of them behind high walls. Single residences with private parks, Teg had said. The monoscope had revealed guards walking the wall tops.

  Tormsa spat on the ground in front of him. "Harkonnen place."

  "They built to make people feel small," Duncan said.

  Tormsa nodded. "Small, no power in you."

  The guide had become almost loquacious, Duncan thought.

  Occasionally during the night, Duncan had defied the order for silence and tried to make conversation.

  "What animals made these passages?"

  It had seemed a logical question for people trotting along an obvious animal track, even the musty smell of beasts in it.

  "Do not talk!" Tormsa snapped.

  Later, Duncan asked why they could not get a vehicle of some sort and escape in that. Even a groundcar would be preferable to this painful march across country where one route felt much like another.

  Tormsa stopped them in a patch of moonlight and looked at Duncan as though he suspected his charge had suddenly become bereft of sense.

  "Vehicles can follow!"

  "No one can follow us when we're on foot?"

  "Followers also must be on foot. Here, they will be killed. They know."

  What a weird place! What a primitive place.

  In the shelter of the Bene Gesserit Keep, Duncan had not realized the nature of the planet around him. Later, in the no-globe, he had been removed from contact with the outside. He had pre-ghola and ghola memories, but how inadequate those were! When he thought about it now, he realized there had been clues. It was obvious that Gammu possessed rudimentary weather control. And Teg had said that the orbiting monitors that guarded the planet from attack were of the best.

  Everything for protection, damned little for comfort! It was like Arrakis in that respect.

  Rakis, he corrected himself.

  Teg. Did the old man survive? A captive? What did it mean to be captured here in this age? It had meant brutal slavery in the old Harkonnen days. Burzmali and Lucilla... He glanced at Tormsa.

  "Will we find Burzmali and Lucilla in the city?"

  "If they get through."

  Duncan glanced down at his clothing. Was it a sufficient disguise? A Tleilaxu Master and companion? People would think the companion a Face Dancer, of course. Face Dancers were dangerous.

  The baggy trousers were of some material Duncan had never before seen. It felt like wool to the hand, but he sensed that it was artificial. When he spat on it, spittle did not adhere and the smell was not of wool. His fingers detected a uniformity of texture that no natural material could present. The long soft boots and watchcap were of the same fabric. The garments were loose and puffy except at the ankles. Not quilted, though. Insulated by some trick of manufacture that trapped dead air between the layers. The color was a mottled green and gray - excellent camouflage here.

  Tormsa was dressed in similar garments.

  "How long do we wait here?" Duncan asked.

  Tormsa shook his head for silence. The guide was seated now, knees up, arms wrapped around his legs, head cra
dled against his knees, eyes looking outward over the valley.

  During the night's trip, Duncan had found the clothing remarkably comfortable. Except for that once in the water, his feet stayed warm but not too warm. There was plenty of room in trousers, shirt, and jacket for his body to move easily. Nothing abraded his flesh.

  "Who makes clothing such as this?" Duncan asked.

  "We made it," Tormsa growled. "Be silent."

  This was no different than the pre-awakening days at the Sisterhood's Keep, Duncan thought. Tormsa was saying: "No need for you to know."

  Presently, Tormsa stretched out his legs and straightened. He appeared to relax. He glanced at Duncan. "Friends in the city signal that there are searchers overhead."

  " 'Thopters?"

  "Yes."

  "Then what do we do?"

  "You must do what I do and nothing else."

  "You're just sitting there."

  "For now. We will go down into the valley soon."

  "But how -"

  "When you traverse such country as this you become one of the animals that live here. Look at the tracks and see how they walk and how they lie down for a rest."

  "But can't the searchers tell the difference between..."

  "If the animals browse, you make the motions of browsing. If searchers come, you continue to do what it was you were doing, what any animal would do. Searchers will be high in the air. That is lucky for us. They cannot tell animal from human unless they come down."

  "But won't they -"

  "They trust their machines and the motions they see. They are lazy. They fly high. That way, the search goes faster. They trust their own intelligence to read their instruments and tell which is animal and which is human."

  "So they'll just go by us if they think we're wild animals."

  "If they doubt, they will scan us a second time. We must not change the pattern of movements after being scanned."

  It was a long speech for the usually taciturn Tormsa. He studied Duncan carefully now. "You understand?"

  "How will I know when we're being scanned?"

  "Your gut will tingle. You will feel in your stomach the fizz of a drink that no man should swallow."

  Duncan nodded. "Ixian scanners."

  "Let it not alarm you," Tormsa said. "Animals here are accustomed to it. Sometimes, they may pause, but only for an instant and then they go on as if nothing has happened. Which, for them, is true. It is only for us that something evil may happen."

  Presently, Tormsa stood. "We will go down into the valley now. Follow closely. Do exactly what I do and nothing else."

  Duncan fell into step behind his guide. Soon, they were under the covering trees. Sometime during the night's passage, Duncan realized, he had begun to accept his place in the schemes of others. A new patience was taking over his awareness. And there was excitement goaded by curiosity.

  What kind of a universe had come out of the Atreides times? Gammu. What a strange place Giedi Prime had become.

  Slowly but distinctly, things were being revealed and each new thing opened a view to more that could be learned. He could feel patterns taking shape. One day, he thought, there would be a single pattern and then he would know why they had brought him back from the dead.

  Yes, it was a matter of opening doors, he thought. You opened one door and that let you into a place where there were other doors. You chose a door in this new place and examined what that revealed to you. There might be times when you were forced to try all of the doors but the more doors you opened, the more certain you became of which door to open next. Finally, a door would open into a place you recognized. Then you could say: "Ahhhh, this explains everything."

  "Searchers come," Tormsa said. "We are browsing animals now." He reached up to a screening bush and tore down a small limb.

  Duncan did the same.

  ***

  "I must rule with eye and claw - as the hawk among lesser birds."

  -Atreides assertion (Ref: BG Archives)

  At daybreak, Teg emerged from the concealing windbreaks beside a main road. The road was a wide, flat thoroughfare - beam-hardened and kept bare of plant life. Ten lanes, Teg estimated, suitable for both vehicle and foot traffic. There was mostly foot traffic on it at this hour.

  He had brushed most of the dust off his clothing and made sure there were no signs of rank on it. His gray hair was not as neat as he usually preferred but he had only his fingers for a comb.

  Traffic on the road was headed toward the city of Ysai many kilometers across the valley. The morning was cloudless with a light breeze in his face moving toward the sea somewhere far behind him.

  During the night he had come to a delicate balance with his new awareness. Things flickered in his second vision: knowledge of things around him before those things occurred, awareness of where he must put his foot in the next step. Behind this lay the reactive trigger that he knew could snap him into the blurring responses that flesh should not be able to accommodate. Reason could not explain the thing. He felt that he walked precariously along the cutting edge of a knife.

  Try as he might, he could not resolve what had happened to him under the T-probe. Was it akin to what a Reverend Mother experienced in the spice agony? But he sensed no accumulation of Other Memories out of his past. He did not think the Sisters could do what he did. The doubled vision that told him what to anticipate from every movement within the range of his senses seemed a new kind of truth.

  Teg's Mentat teachers had always assured him there was a form of living-truth not susceptible to proof by the marshaling of ordinary facts. It was carried sometimes in fables and poetry and often went contrary to desires, so he had been told.

  "The most difficult experience for a Mentat to accept," they said.

  Teg had always reserved judgment on this pronouncement but now he was forced to accept it. The T-probe had thrust him over a threshold into a new reality.

  He did not know why he chose this particular moment to emerge from hiding, except that it fitted him into an acceptable flow of human movement.

  Most of that movement on the road was composed of market gardeners towing panniers of vegetables and fruit. The panniers were supported behind them on cheap suspensors. Awareness of that food sent sharp hunger pains through him but he forced himself to ignore them. With experience of more primitive planets in his long service to the Bene Gesserit, he saw this human activity as little different from that of farmers leading loaded animals. The foot traffic struck him as an odd mixture of ancient and modern - farmers afoot, their produce floating behind them on perfectly ordinary technological devices. Except for the suspensors this scene was very like a similar day in humankind's most ancient past. A draft animal was a draft animal, even if it came off an assembly line in an Ixian factory.

  Using his new second vision, Teg chose one of the farmers, a squat, dark-skinned man with heavy features and thickly calloused hands. The man walked with a defiant sense of independence. He towed eight large panniers piled with rough-skinned melons. The smell of them was a mouth-watering agony to Teg as he matched his stride to that of the farmer. Teg strode for a few minutes in silence, then ventured: "Is this the best road to Ysai?"

  "It is a long way," the man said. He had a guttural voice, something cautious in it.

  Teg glanced back at the loaded panniers.

  The farmer looked sidelong at Teg. "We go to a market center. Others take our produce from there to Ysai."

  As they talked, Teg realized the farmer had guided (almost herded) him close to the edge of the road. The man glanced back and jerked his head slightly, nodding forward. Three more farmers came up beside them and closed in around Teg and his companion until tall panniers concealed them from the rest of the traffic.

  Teg tensed. What were they planning? He sensed no menace, though. His doubled vision detected nothing violent in his immediate vicinity.

  A heavy vehicle sped past them and on ahead. Teg knew of its passage only by the smell of burned fuel,
the wind that shook the panniers, the thrumming of a powerful engine and sudden tension in his companions. The high panniers completely hid the passing vehicle.

  "We have been looking for you to protect you, Bashar," the farmer beside him said. "There are many who hunt you but none of them with us along here."

  Teg shot a startled glance at the man.

  "We served with you at Renditai," the farmer said.

  Teg swallowed. Renditai? He was a moment recalling it - only a minor skirmish in his long history of conflicts and negotiations.

  "I am sorry but I do not know your name," Teg said.

  "Be glad that you do not know our names. It is better that way."

  "But I'm grateful."

  "This is a small repayment, which we are glad to make, Bashar."

  "I must get to Ysai," Teg said.

  "It is dangerous there."

  "It is dangerous everywhere."

  "We guessed you would go to Ysai. Someone will come soon and you will ride in concealment. Ahhhh, here he comes. We have not seen you here, Bashar. You have not been here."

  One of the other farmers took over the towing of his companion's load, pulling two strings of panniers while the farmer Teg had chosen hustled Teg under a tow rope and into a dark vehicle. Teg glimpsed shiny plasteel and plaz as the vehicle slowed only briefly for the pickup. The door closed sharply behind him and he found himself on a soft upholstered seat, alone in the back of a groundcar. The car picked up speed and soon was beyond the marching farmers. The windows around Teg had been darkened, giving him a dusky view of the passing scene. The driver was a shaded silhouette.

  This first chance to relax in warm comfort since his capture almost lured Teg into sleep. He sensed no threats. His body still ached from the demands he had made on it and from the agonies of the T-probe.

  He told himself, though, that he must stay awake and alert.

  The driver leaned sideways and spoke over his shoulder without turning: "They have been hunting for you for two days, Bashar. Some think you already off-planet."