Road to Dune (52 page)

Somewhere in the distance, familiar voices—two of them?—called out to him. “Vergyl! Vergyl! Shut the damn thing off, Noret!”

He tried to lift his head and look around, but could not move. Chirox continued to press the sharp point against his jugular vein. His muscles were paralyzed, as if frozen inside a block of ice.

“Get me a disruptor gun!” He recognized the voice at last. Xavier. Somehow, incongruously, Vergyl worried more about his brother’s disapproval than dying.

But then the mek straightened and removed the dagger blade from his throat.

He heard more voices, the thumping of boots, and the clattering of weaponry. Peripherally, Vergyl saw movement, and crimson-and-green jihadi uniforms. Xavier shouted commands to his men, but Chirox retracted the jagged dagger, his other weapons, and all four arms into his torso. The fiercely glowing optic threads dulled to a soft glimmer.

Zon Noret placed himself in front of the robot. “Don’t shoot, Segundo. Chirox could have killed him, but didn’t. He is programmed to take advantage of a weakness and deliver a mortal blow, yet he made a conscious decision against it.”

“I did not wish to kill him.” The combat robot reset itself to a stationary position. “It was not necessary.”

Vergyl finally cleared his head enough to push himself into a stiff sitting position. “That mek actually showed … compassion?” He still felt dazed from the mysterious stun blast. “Imagine that, a machine with feelings.”

“It wasn’t compassion at all,” Xavier said, with a contentious scowl. He reached down to help his brother to his feet.

“It was the strangest thing,” Vergyl insisted. “Did you see the gentleness in his eyes?”

Zon Noret, intent on his training mek, looked into the machine’s panel box, studied instrument readings, and made adjustments. “Chirox simply assessed the situation and went into survival mode. But there must have been something buried in his original programming.”

“Machines don’t care about survival,” Xavier snapped. “You saw them at Peridot Colony. They hurl themselves into battle without concern for personal safety.” He shook his head. “There’s something wrong with your mek’s programming, a glitch.”

Vergyl stared over at Chirox, caught the gaze of the glowing optic threads. In the depths of the lights, the young construction officer thought he detected a flicker of something animate, which intrigued and frightened him at the same time.

“Humans can learn compassion, too,” Chirox said, unexpectedly.

“I’ll run him through a complete overhaul,” Noret said, but his voice was uncertain.

Xavier stood in front of Vergyl, checking him for serious injuries. Then he spoke in a shaky voice as he led his brother out of the training chamber. “That was quite a scare you gave me.”

“I just wanted to fight a real enemy for once.”

Xavier looked deeply saddened. “Vergyl, I fear that you will have your chance, eventually. This Jihad will not be over anytime soon.”

THE FACES OF A MARTYR

A Tale of the Butlerian Jihad

I
’m sorry,” Rekur Van said to his fellow Tlulaxa researcher as he slipped the knife deftly through the victim’s spine, then added an extra twist. “I need this ship more than you do.”

Blood seeped around the slender steel blade, then spilled in a final dying gush as Van yanked the knife back out. His comrade jittered and twitched as nerve endings attempted to fire. Van tumbled him out the hatch of the small vessel, discarding him onto the pavement of the spaceport.

Explosions, shouts, and weapons fire rang through the streets of the main Tlulaxa city. The fatally wounded genetic scientist sprawled on the ground, still shuddering, his close-set eyes dimming as they blinked accusations at Rekur Van. Discarded, like so many other vital things …

He wiped the blood on his garments, but his hands remained sticky. He would have time to launder the clothes and clean his skin, once he escaped. Blood … it was the currency of his trade, a genetic resource filled with useful DNA. He hated to waste so much of it.

But now the League of Nobles wanted blood.
His
blood.

Though he was one of the most brilliant Tlulaxa scientists and well connected with powerful religious leaders, Van had to flee his homeworld to escape the lynch mobs. Outraged members of the League blockaded the planet and swept in to extract their justice. If they caught him, he could not begin to imagine the retribution they would inflict upon him. “Fanatics—all of you!” he shouted uselessly toward the city, then sealed the hatch.

With no time to retrieve his priceless research documents and forced to leave his personal wealth behind, Van used his bloodstained hands to operate the stolen ship’s controls. Without a plan, wanting only to get off the planet before the vengeful League soldiers could seize him, he launched his vessel into the sky.

“Damn you, Iblis Ginjo!” he said to himself. It gave him very little consolation to know that the Grand Patriarch was already dead.

Ginjo had always treated him as a lower form of life. Van and the Grand Patriarch had been business associates who depended on each other but shared no feelings of trust. In the end, the League had discovered the horrific secret of the Tlulaxa organ farms: missing soldiers and Zensunni slaves were cut up to provide replacement parts for other wounded fighters. Now the tables had turned. All of the Tlulaxa were in turmoil, scrambling for their lives to escape the League’s indignant vengeance. Flesh merchants had to go into hiding, and legitimate traders were run off of civilized worlds. Disgraced and ruined, Van was now a hunted man.

But even without his laboratory records, his mind still carried vital knowledge to be shared with the highest bidder. And sealed in a pocket he took with him a small vial of special genetic material that would allow him to start over again. If he could only get away …

Reaching orbit in his stolen ship, Van saw powerful javelin battleships manned by angry jihadis. Numerous Tlulaxa vessels—most of them flown by inexperienced and panicked pilots such as himself—streaked away in a pell-mell fashion, and the League warships targeted all Tlulaxa craft that came within range.

“Why not just assume we’re
all
guilty?” he snarled at the images, knowing no one could hear him.

Van increased acceleration, not knowing how fast the unfamiliar ship could go. With the end of his sleeve, he wiped away a blot of drying blood on the control panel so he could read the instruments better. The League javelins took potshots at him, and an angry voice over the commline.

“Tlulaxa craft! Stand down—surrender or be destroyed.”

“Why not use your weapons against the thinking machines?” Van retorted. “The Army of the Jihad is wasting time and resources here. Or have you forgotten the real enemies of humanity?” Surely any supposed Tlulaxa crimes were minimal compared to decades of devastation by the computer evermind Omnius.

Apparently, the javelin commander did not appreciate his sarcasm. Exploding projectiles streaked silently past him, and Van reacted with a sudden lurch of deceleration; the artillery detonated some distance from its intended target, but the shock-wave still put his stolen ship into a spin. Flashing lights and alarm signals lit the control panels in the cockpit, but Van did not send out a distress signal. Noiselessly, he tumbled out of control, playing dead—and the League ships soon left him to hunt other hapless Tlulaxa escapees. They had plenty of victims to choose from.

When the League battleships were finally gone, Van felt he was safe enough to engage stabilizers. After several exaggerated attempts, he compensated for the out-of-control rolling and got his ship back on course. With no destination in mind, intent only on escaping, he flew out of the system as far and as fast as he could go. He did not regret what he was leaving behind.

For most of his life, Van had worked to develop vital new biological techniques, as had generations of his people before him. During the Jihad, the Tlulaxa had made themselves fabulously wealthy, and presumably indispensable. Now, though, Serena’s fanatics would raze the original organ farms, destroying the transplant tanks, and “mercifully” putting the donors out of their misery. Short-sighted fools! How the League would complain in coming years when eyeless or limbless veterans wailed about their injuries and had nowhere else to go.

The myopic League idealists didn’t consider practical matters, didn’t plan well at all. As with so many things in Serena Butler’s Jihad, they chased unrealistic dreams, were driven by foolish emotions. Van hated those people.

He grasped the ship’s control bar as if to strangle it, pretending it was Iblis Ginjo’s thick neck. Despite a full résumé of despicable acts, the Grand Patriarch had succeeded in keeping his own name clean while shifting blame onto an old, hard-bitten war hero, Xavier Harkonnen, and the whole Tlulaxa race. Ginjo’s ever-scheming widow falsely portrayed her fallen husband as a martyr.

The League could steal the “honor” of the Tlulaxa people. Mobs could take their wealth and force his people to live as outlaws. But the betrayers could never take away Rekur Van’s special knowledge and skills. This scapegoat was still able to fight back.

Finally, Van made up his mind where he should go, where he should take his secret and innovative cloning technology, as well as viable cells from Serena Butler herself.

He headed out past the boundaries of League space to find the machine worlds, where he intended to present himself to the evermind Omnius.

ON SALUSA SECUNDUS, capital of the League of Nobles, a screaming, unruly crowd set fire to the figure of a man.

Stony silent, Vorian Atreides stood in the shadows of an ornate arch, watching the crowd. His throat was clenched so tightly that he could not shout his dismay. Though he was a champion of the Jihad, this wild throng would not listen to him.

The effigy was a poor likeness of Xavier Harkonnen, but the mob’s hatred for him was unmistakable. The mannequin dangled from a makeshift gibbet above a pile of dry sticks. A young man tossed in a small igniter, and within seconds outstretched flames began to consume the effigy’s symbolic Army of the Jihad uniform—like the one Xavier had been so proud to wear.

Vorian’s friend had devoted most of his life to the war against the thinking machines. Now an irrational throng had found a uniform and used it to mock him, stripping it of all medals and insignia, in much the same way Xavier had been stripped of his rightful place in history. Now they were burning him.

As the fire caught, the figure danced and smoldered on the end of its tether. Raucous cheering rattled the windows of nearby buildings, celebrating the death of a traitor. The people considered this an act of vengeance. Vor considered it an abomination.

After Vor learned how brave Xavier had exposed the Tlulaxa organ farms and brought down the treacherous Grand Patriarch Ginjo, he had rushed to Salusa. He’d never expected to witness such an appalling and well-orchestrated backlash against his friend. For days Vor had continued to speak out, trying to stop the hysterical anger from striking the wrong target. Despite his high rank, few came to his support. The smear campaign against Xavier had begun, and history was being rewritten even while it was still news. Vor felt like a man standing on the beach in a Caladan hurricane, holding up his hands to ward off a tidal wave.

Even Xavier’s own daughters bowed to pressure and changed their names from Harkonnen to their mother’s surname of Butler. Their mother Octa, always quiet and shy, had withdrawn in misery to the City of Introspection, refusing to see outsiders … .

Wearing street clothes to conceal his identity, Vor stood among the crowd, unnoticed. Like Xavier, he was proud of his service in the Army of the Jihad, but in the mounting emotional fervor this was no time to appear in uniform.

Over the course of the long Jihad, Primero Vorian Atreides had engaged in many battles against the thinking machines. He had fought at Xavier’s side and achieved tremendous, but costly, victories. Xavier was the bravest man Vor had ever known, and now billions of people despised him.

Unable to tolerate the spectacle any longer, Vor turned away from the throng. Such mass ignorance and stupidity! The ill-informed and easily manipulated multitude would believe whatever they chose to. Vorian Atreides alone would remember the brave truth about the Harkonnen name.

THE INDEPENDENT ROBOT stepped back to admire the new sign mounted on his laboratory wall.
Understanding Human Nature Is the Most Difficult of All Mental Exercises.

While considering the implications of the statement, Erasmus shifted the expression on his flowmetal face. For centuries his quest had been to decipher these biological creatures: They had so many flaws, but somehow, in a spark of genius, they had created thinking machines. The puzzle intrigued him.

He had mounted various slogans around his laboratory to initiate trains of thought at unexpected times. Philosophy was far more than a game to him; it was a means by which he improved his machine mind.

It Is Possible to Achieve Whatever You Envision, Whether You Are Man or Machine.

To facilitate his better understanding of the biological enemy, Erasmus performed constant experiments. Strapped onto tables, confined within transparent tanks, or sealed within airtight cells, the robot’s current round of subjects moaned and writhed. Some prayed to invisible gods. Others screamed and begged for mercy from their captor, which showed just how delusional they were. A number bled, urinated, and leaked all manner of fluids, discourteously messing his laboratory. Fortunately, he had subservient robots as well as human slaves to restore the facility to an antiseptic and orderly state.

Flesh Is Just Soft Metal.

The robot had dissected thousands of human brains and bodies, in addition to conducting psychological experiments. He tested people with sensory deprivation, causing extreme pain and unrelenting fear. He studied the behavior of individuals as well as crowd activities. Yet through it all, despite his meticulous attention to detail, Erasmus knew he continued to miss something important. He could not find a way to assess and collate all the data so that it fit within a comprehensible framework, a “grand unified theory” of human nature. The behavioral extremes were too far separated.