Always before, he'd had the faith and confidence that a new ghola was being grown for him. This time, though convinced he would not return to life, Waff was content with what he had accomplished. His legacy. The evil Honored Matres had tried to exterminate God's Messenger on Rakis, and Waff would bring Him back. What greater accomplishment could a man hope to attain in this life? In any number of lives?
Following the tracker signals, he drove away from the weathered mountains, to the dunes. Ah, the new sandworms must have fled out into open terrain, looking for fresh sand in which to bury themselves and begin their lives anew!
Instead, what he saw horrified him.
He easily located the eight fledgling worms. Much too easily. Waff stopped the groundcar and scrambled out. The hot, thin air made him gasp, and his lungs and throat burned. He could barely see through stinging tears as he hurried forward.
His precious sandworms lay on the hard ground, barely moving. They had cracked the melted crust of the dunes and churned through the soft grainy dirt beneath, only to emerge again. And now they lay dying.
Waff knelt beside one of the weak, failing creatures. It was flaccid, grayish, barely twitching. Another had heaved itself high enough to sprawl across a broken rock, and there it lay deflated and unable to move. Waff touched it, pressed down on the hard rings. The worm hissed and flinched.
"You cannot die! You are the Prophet, and this is Rakis, your home, your holy sanctuary. You must live!" His body was wracked by a spasm of pain, as if his own life was tied to those of the sandworms. "You can't perish, not again!"
But it seemed that the crippling damage to this world was simply too much for the worms. If even the great Prophet Himself could not endure, then these must assuredly be the End Times.
He had heard of it in ancient prophecies: Kralizec, the great battle at the end of the universe. The crux point that would change everything. Without God's Messenger, surely humanity would be lost. The final days were at hand.
Waff pressed his forehead against the dusty, dying creature's yielding surface. He had done everything he could. Maybe Rakis would never again support the behemoth worms. Maybe this was indeed the end.
From what he saw with his own eyes, he could not deny that the Prophet had truly fallen.
People strive to achieve perfection--ostensibly an honorable goal--but complete perfection is dangerous. To be imperfect, but human, is far preferable.
--MOTHER SUPERIOR DARWI ODRADE,
defense before Bene Gesserit Council
When the older and inferior Paul Atreides ghola lay dying on the floor, Paolo turned away, pleased with his victory but far more interested in his other priority. He had proved himself to Omnius and Erasmus. The special ultraspice that would unlock all of his prescient abilities was his now. It would elevate him to the next level, to his exalted destiny--as the Baron had taught him for so long. During that time, Paolo had convinced himself that this was what he wanted, brushing aside any nagging qualms or reservations.
Around the cathedral hall, quicksilver robots stood at attention, ready to attack the remaining humans should Omnius give the order. Maybe Paolo himself would decide to issue such a command, once he was in control. He could hear the pleased laughter of the Baron, the sobs of Chani and Lady Jessica. Paolo wasn't sure which sounds he enjoyed more. His greatest thrill was the clear proof of what he had always known: I am the one!
He was the one who would change the course of the universe and control the end of Kralizec, guiding the next age of humanity and machines. Did even the evermind know what he was about to face? Paolo allowed himself a secretive, amused smile; he would never be a mere puppet for thinking machines. Omnius would soon learn what the Bene Gesserit had long ago discovered: A Kwisatz Haderach is not to be manipulated!
Paolo slipped the bloody dagger into his waistband, strode over to the Face Dancer, and held out a hand to collect the spoils of combat. "That spice is mine."
Khrone smiled faintly. "As you wish." He extended the cinnamony paste. Not interested in savoring it, Paolo quickly consumed a whole messy mouthful, far more than he should have. He wanted what it would unlock within him, and he wanted it right away. The taste was bitter, potent, and powerful. Before the Face Dancer could withdraw the offering, Paolo grabbed more and swallowed another mouthful.
"Not so much, boy!" the Baron said. "Don't be a glutton."
"Who are you to talk about gluttony?" Paolo's retort drew a rumbling chuckle in response.
On the floor where he lay dying, Paul Atreides moaned. Chani looked up in despair from beside her beloved, her fingers dripping with his blood. Her face a grief-stricken mask, Jessica held her son's clenching hand. Paolo trembled. Why was it taking Paul so long just to die? He should have killed his rival more cleanly.
Kneeling over him, Dr. Yueh worked feverishly to save Paul, trying to stanch the flow of blood, but the Suk doctor's deeply troubled face told the terrible story. Even his advanced medical training was insufficient. Paolo's knife strike had done all the damage it had needed to.
Those people were all irrelevant now. Mere seconds had passed when Paolo felt the potent melange burst into his bloodstream like a lasgun blast. His thoughts came faster, sharper. It was working! His mind was suffused with a certainty that outsiders might have considered hubris or megalomania. But Paolo knew it only as Truth.
He drew himself taller, as if he were growing physically and maturing in all ways, so that he loomed above everyone else in the chamber. His mind expanded into the cosmos. Even Omnius and Erasmus now seemed like insects to him, muddling through their grandiose, but ultimately minuscule, dreams.
As if from a great height, Paolo looked down at the Baron, the self-absorbed snake who had spent so many years dominating him, bossing him around, "teaching" him. Suddenly the once-powerful leader of House Harkonnen seemed laughably insignificant.
The Face Dancer Khrone studied the scene, and then--with seeming uncertainty--turned toward the evermind's manifestation as an old man. Paolo saw through all of them with incredible ease.
"Let me tell you what I will do next." In his own ears, Paolo's booming voice sounded like a god's. Even the great Omnius must tremble before him. Words flowed with the force of a cosmic Coriolis storm, rushing along on a current of ultraspice.
"I will implement my new mandate. The prophecy is true: I will change the universe. As the ultimate and final Kwisatz Haderach, I know my destiny--as do all of you, for your actions led to this prophecy." He smiled. "Even yours, Omnius!"
The false old man responded with an annoyed frown. Beside him the robot Erasmus grinned indulgently, waiting to see what the just-hatched superman would do. All of Paolo's visions of domination, conquest, and perfect control were based on prescience. He harbored no doubts in his mind. Every detail unfolded before him. The young man continued to spew pronouncements.
"Now that I have come into my true powers, there is no need for the thinking-machine fleet to obliterate the human-inhabited planets. I can control them all." He waved a hand. "Oh, we may have to annihilate a minor world or two to demonstrate our strength--or maybe just because we can--but we will keep alive the vast majority of people, as fodder."
Paolo gasped as even more ideas flooded into his head, building momentum and power. "Once we have swallowed up Chapterhouse, we will open the Sisterhood's breeding records. From there, we will implement my master plan of making brilliant, perfect humans, combining whatever traits I choose. Workers and thinkers, drones, engineers, and--occasionally--leaders." He spun toward the old man. "And you, Omnius, will construct a vast infrastructure for me. If we give our perfect humans too much freedom they'll mess everything up. We must eliminate the wild, troublesome genetic lines." He snickered to himself.
"In fact, the Atreides bloodline is the most unmanageable of all, so I shall be the last Atreides. Now that I have arrived, history needs no more of us." He glanced around, but did not see the man who came to mind. "And all those Duncan Idahos. How tedious they'v
e become!"
Paolo was speaking faster and faster, swept along by intoxicating spice visions. The look of confusion on even the Baron's face made the young man wonder if anyone here could comprehend him any longer. They seemed so primitive to him now. What if his own thoughts were so grand that they were beyond the understanding of the most sophisticated thinking machines? That would really be something!
He began to pace around the chamber, ignoring glares and gestures from the Baron. Gradually Paolo's motions became jerky, manic. "Yes! The first step is to sweep away the old, mow down and dispense with the outdated and unnecessary. We must clear a path for the new and the perfect. That's a concept all thinking machines can embrace."
Erasmus stared at him and mockingly reshaped his flowmetal face into a perfect likeness of the old man that represented Omnius. His expression reflected disbelief, as if he considered Paolo's pronouncements a joke, the rantings of a deluded child. A flare of anger rose within Paolo. This robot wasn't taking him seriously!
Paolo saw the whole canvas of the future unrolling before him, broad strokes revealed by the incredible magnifying power of ultraspice. Some of the upcoming events became razor sharp, and he discerned more specifics, intricate details. The super-potent melange was even stronger than he had imagined, and the future became intensely focused in his mind, fractal minutiae unfolding before him in an infinite, yet completely expected, pattern.
In the midst of this mindstorm, something else was unleashed from within his cells: All the memories buried there from his original life. With a roar that briefly drowned out even the other clamoring knowledge, he suddenly remembered everything about Paul Atreides. Though the Baron had raised Paolo and the machines had corrupted him into what they imagined would be their puppet, he was still himself at the core.
He scanned the chamber, viewing everyone from a new perspective: Jessica, dear Chani, and himself lying in a pool of blood, still twitching, gasping a last few breaths. Had he done that--a bizarre form of suicide? No, Omnius had forced him. But how could anyone really force a Kwisatz Haderach to do anything? Details of the fight with Paul clashed in his mind, and he squeezed his eyes shut, trying to drive back the disturbing images. He didn't want to serve Omnius. He hated the Baron Harkonnen. He could not let himself be the cause of such destruction.
He had the power to change everything. Wasn't he the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach? Thanks to the ultraspice and his own Atreides genes, Paolo now possessed a greater prescience than had ever before been possible. Not even the smallest event could slip past him.
In a glorious tableau, he knew he could see everything about the tapestry of the future. Every tiny detail, if he wanted! No unexplored terrain, no wrinkles or nuances in the topography of events to come.
Paolo paused in his restless pacing and gazed ahead, seeing beyond the walls of the grand machine cathedral, feeling overwhelmed by thoughts that no other human could begin to understand. His eyes changed to more than an intense blue-within-blue, to black and glassy, rippled and impenetrable like a landscape of seared dunes.
In the background, he heard the Baron's voice. "What's the matter with you, boy? Snap out of it."
But the visions continued to shoot at Paolo like projectiles from a repeater gun. He couldn't dodge them, could only receive them, like an invincible man standing up against ferocious firepower.
Outside in the grand machine city, he heard a tremendous commotion. Alarms rang, and quicksilver robots rushed out of the cathedral chamber to respond. Paolo knew exactly what was happening, could see it from every angle. And he knew how each action would turn out, regardless of how Omnius, the humans, or the Face Dancers tried to change it.
No longer able to move, Paolo stood staring at moments that were yet to come, everything he could influence and all that he could not. Each second sliced into a billion nanoseconds, then expanded and spread out across a billion star systems. The scope of it threatened to overwhelm him.
What is happening? he asked himself.
Only what we brought upon ourselves, whispered the voice of Paul-within.
With new eyes Paolo saw moment by unfolding moment, expanding outward from the machine city, beyond the planet, the whole scope of the Old Empire, the farthest reaches of the Scattering, and the vast thinking-machine empire.
Another nanosecond passed.
The ultraspice had given him absolutely uncontaminated revelation. He saw time folding forward and backward from the focal point of his consciousness.
Perfect prescience.
Caught in the tidal wave of his own power, Paolo began to see much more than he had ever wanted to see. He witnessed every heartbeat a thousand times over, every action of every single person--every being--in the entire universe. He knew how each instant would play out from now until the end of history, and in reverse, to the beginning of time.
The knowledge flooded into him, and he drowned in it.
He watched Paul Atreides in his death throes and saw his counterpart go motionless, haloed by the crimson puddle on the floor, eyes staring into blessed oblivion.
Paolo, who had wanted to be the final Kwisatz Haderach so badly he had killed for it, now became petrified by the utter tedium of his own existence. He knew every breath and pulsepoint in the entire history and future of the universe.
Another nanosecond passed.
How could any person endure this? Paolo was trapped in a predetermined path, like a computer's infinite loop. No surprises, choices, or movement. Absolute foreknowledge rendered Paolo entirely irrelevant.
He envisioned himself sinking in slow motion to the floor and lying face up, unable to move or speak, unable even to blink his eyes. Fossilizing. Then Paolo saw the last and most terrible revelation. He was not the true and final Kwisatz Haderach, after all. It was not him. He would never accomplish what he had dreamed.
With spice roaring through him, the past went dark, and Paolo could only stare fixedly into the future, which he had already seen a thousand times over.
Another nanosecond passed.
One can always find a battlefield if one looks hard enough.
--BASHAR MILES TEG,
Memoirs of an Old Commander
Remnants of dust and sand from the emptying hold swirled out into the no-ship's corridors, but the worms were gone, and Leto II with them. Bright sunlight from the machine world shone through the gaping holes. Stunned, Sheeana listened to the sounds of the behemoths crashing through Synchrony. She longed to be with them. Those once-captive sandworms were hers as well.
But Leto was closer to them, a part of them, and they were part of him.
Duncan Idaho came up behind her. She turned, the smell of grit clinging to her face and clothes. "It's Leto. He's . . . with the sandworms."
He flashed a hard smile. "That's something the machines won't expect. Even Miles would have been surprised." He grasped her arm and hurried her away from the open cargo hold. "Now we've got to do something just as dramatic for ourselves."
"What Leto is doing will be a hard act to follow."
Duncan paused. "We've been running from that old man and woman for years, and I don't intend to sit here in this no-ship prison anymore. Our armory is filled with weapons stockpiled by the Honored Matres. We also have the rest of the mines that the Face Dancers didn't use to sabotage this ship. Let's take the fight outside, to them!"
She felt the steel of his determination and found her own. "I'm ready. And we have more than two hundred people aboard trained in Bene Gesserit combat techniques." Inside her mind, Serena Butler imparted visions of terrible combat, humans against fighting robots, incredible slaughters. But in spite of these horrors, Sheeana felt a strange exhilaration. "It's been programmed into our genes for thousands of years. Like an eagle to a serpent, a bull to a bear, a wasp to a spider, humans and thinking machines are mortal enemies."
AFTER DECADES OF running and many escapes from the tachyon net, this would be their final showdown. Tired of feeling helpless, the Ithaca captives
crowded forward to the armory. All were eager to fight back, though they knew the odds were heavily against them. Duncan relished it.
The stockpile of armaments was not particularly impressive. Many of the stored weapons fired only flechettes, razor-sharp needles that would not be effective against armored combat robots. But Duncan handed out old-style lasguns, pulse launchers, and explosive projectile rifles. Demolition squads could plant the remaining mines against the foundations of thinking-machine buildings and detonate them.
The Tleilaxu Master Scytale pushed his way through the crowded corridor, trying to reach Sheeana, looking as if he had something important to say. "Remember, we have more enemies out there than just robots. Omnius has an army of Face Dancers to stand against us."
Duncan handed a flechette rifle to Reverend Mother Calissa, who appeared as bloodthirsty as any Honored Matre. "This will cut down plenty of Face Dancers."
The little man announced with a thin smile, "I have another way to help. Even before we were captured, I began to produce the specific toxin that would target Face Dancers. I made sixty canisters of it, in case we had to saturate all the air aboard the ship. Unleash it against the Face Dancers in the city. It may make humans a little nauseated but it is lethal to any Face Dancer."
"Our weapons could do the rest--or our bare hands," Sheeana said, then turned to the other workers. "Get the canisters! There's a battle outside!"
A fierce army of humans streamed out through the gaping hole torn in the Ithaca's hull. Sheeana led her Bene Gesserits. Reverend Mothers Calissa and Elyen guided groups through the shifting streets in search of vulnerable targets. Reverend Mothers, acolytes, male Bene Gesserits, proctors, and workers rushed out carrying weapons, many of which had never been fired before.
With a loud battle cry, a well-armed Duncan charged forward into the bizarre metropolis. In his original lifetime, he had not survived long enough to join Paul Muad'Dib and his Fremen Fedaykin in bloody raids against the Harkonnens. The stakes were more desperate now, and he intended to make a difference.