Sisterhood of Dune (34 page)

Vor knew the old crew chief was wrong, but in order to convince him otherwise, he would have to reveal more about himself than he wanted to. Instead, he went to work with the others in the gigantic spice-excavator, a roving machine the size of a large building. Like an artificial grazing beast, it chewed trenches across spice-enriched sands. On big treads the excavator could make surprisingly good time across the dunes, racing from one sheltered rock outcrop to another while aircraft kept watch for an approaching sandworm. Hopscotching across the desert, the excavator gathered large amounts of melange and tried to outrun the monstrous creatures that roved the spice sands.

The collectors spilled debris from one centrifuge to the next to the next, like the successive stomachs in an ungulate, except in this instance they were separating out the sand particles. All that remained was the rich soft powder that smelled like cinnamon but was an extremely potent drug.

Early in Vor’s life, melange had been an interesting commodity, a rare substance distributed to nobles by the merchant Aurelius Venport. During the Omnius-induced plagues, however, spice had proved to be an effective palliative, boosting immune systems and helping many people recover. That discovery, and humanity’s desperation, had sparked a boom of melange harvesting on the harsh desert planet, where few civilized people had previously wanted to go. During the spice rush, hordes of ambitious fortune-hunters (both optimists and charlatans) journeyed across space to Arrakis. Many died in the rush, and a few got rich. The influx of offworlders forever changed the lives of the reclusive denizens, expanding small company towns like Arrakis City into bustling commercial hubs.

As an unforeseen consequence of the measures to fight the plagues, much of the Imperium was now addicted to spice, although Vor couldn’t recall having seen users on Kepler. The interplanetary markets demanded increased production. During the epidemics, all competitors were tolerated in order to help meet the needs of sick populations. Now, however, the powerful Combined Mercantiles, part of the Venport commercial empire, was ruthless about driving out all competition and quashing rivals one by one, through bribery, blackmail, sabotage, or more extreme means. Many rival settlements were now just ghost towns in the desert rocks.

Calbir and his spice crew, including Vorian, worked for Combined Mercantiles. When Vor had arrived in Arrakis City and asked for work on a deep-desert crew, he was repeatedly warned to steer clear of anything but a Venport operation if he valued his life. “Then again,” said one desiccated and sad-looking woman who sold him supplies, “if you valued your life, you wouldn’t be going out there in the first place.”

He had brushed her aside with a laugh. “I’ve had enough comforts in my life. The open dunes call to me. There are people far out in the desert that I’d like to meet.”

“If you say so. But don’t be so sure that they want to meet
you.
”

By now, Vor had spent several weeks on the spice crew. It was hot and dusty work, but he didn’t mind. He found it rejuvenating, for he could let his mind relax into a blank state and go about his duties with no thought for the future except what lay at the end of the next long and exhausting shift. The work itself was exciting: How could a job ever become tedious when at any moment a leviathan could burrow up from beneath the sands and devour everything?

During its daily work, the excavator scuttled across the open sands, hurrying to the next rock outcrop. From the moment a scout skimcraft spotted a spice deposit, to the moment the framework haulers dropped harvesting machinery onto the open dunes, Vor and his team worked in a race against time. The giant machinery heaved itself across the sand, scraping up as much rust-colored melange as possible. As a last resort, if they should ever find themselves too far from safety and unable to outrun an oncoming worm, the crew could eject in an escape pod, and cargo containers of melange would launch into the sky, guided by sluggish jets to the nearest safety zone, where Combined Mercantiles could retrieve and salvage the people and spice.

So far, that hadn’t happened. A miscalculation by even a minute would doom them. Vor did not want to end his life in the midst of of wreckage slowly digested in a worm’s gullet.

Rather than returning to Arrakis City each day, which was hundreds—sometimes thousands—of kilometers away, the excavator spent the nights on lonely rock outcroppings, hard islands safe from the sandworms. Now, as the stars shone forth out of the impenetrable blackness of an empty desert night, Vor walked restlessly around on the rocks, thinking of Kepler, of Mariella, wondering how many years he’d have to wait before he could risk slipping back there, just to see them again. And if Mariella would still be there.

As he wandered, alone, Vor was intrigued to find evidence of an old shelter made out of stacked boulders. He called Calbir over. “Looks like we aren’t the first ones to camp here. Another excavating crew?”

The grizzled crew chief made an expression of distaste. “Desert people. Zensunnis, probably—descendants of escaped slaves. They came to Arrakis because they thought no sane person would want to settle this place. During the spice rush, they packed up and retreated into the most isolated wilderness, just to get away from people. I hear they still call themselves the Freemen, but scraping out a living here, with no sign of civilization, is hardly being free.”

“Have you ever met one?” Vor asked. “I … I’d like to talk to them.”

“Now why would you want to do that? Get those dreams out of your head! You’ll probably see a desert man if you work around here long enough, but we don’t have much to do with them.”

The weary spice crew bedded down in the open, glad to be out of the stifling confinement of the dusty machinery. Calbir posted a watch, though the men grumbled that it seemed a ridiculous and paranoid precaution, until he showed them the signs of the old desert camp. “I’d rather you lost a little sleep than we all lost our lives. And if you’re not worried about a few nomads, just keep in mind that Josef Venport has made a lot of enemies, too.”

The men didn’t argue further.

The sand and rocks had absorbed thermal energy during the day, and radiated warmth for the first several hours of darkness, but the desert air was so devoid of moisture that it retained little heat. Eventually, the night grew chilly.

The men sat around the rocky camp, wearing cloths over their mouths and noses to keep dust out. They relaxed by telling stories of powerful desert storms they had survived, narrow escapes from sandworm attacks, crew members they had known and lost, and loves they had left behind on other worlds.

Vorian listened, but kept his own stories to himself. He could have spent all night, every night, describing his harrowing escapades throughout the Jihad. He had fought in more battles and visited more planets than all these men combined. But he did not try to gain standing among the spice workers by bragging. Here on a spice crew, a man’s privacy was his privilege, and his past was his own, which he could choose to share, or not. Vor’s favorite moments were not the adventures anyway, but the peaceful years, the day-to-day life with women he had loved for decades, watching his children grow up and have families of their own.

Preferring to reminisce privately about what he had left behind, he lay back with his head against a rounded rock, staring into the quiet desert night as the conversation slowly faded. Vor had much to think about, but he had nothing left to prove in his long life.

The lines of the past can easily tangle and trip us. Whether or not we can see them, these threads of history bind us all.

—
NORMA CENVA
, “Dissertation on the Structure of Reality,” paper submitted to Tio Holtzman on Poritrin

Another Navigator-candidate had died, and Cioba was there to supervise the body’s removal from its sealed tank.

Two male VenHold workers—among those vetted through additional security procedures after the spy, Royce Fayed, infiltrated Kolhar—attached hoses and sealed the hookups to the tank, draining away the valuable melange gas. When the diagnostics flashed green, the silent men affixed breathing masks to their faces and undogged the entry hatch. They reached inside and wrestled with the floppy, half-dissolved corpse.

Cioba watched the operation, her dark eyes flashing, but she said nothing, having been through this routine many times before. Despite the failures, however, Navigator-candidates succeeded far more often than Cioba’s fellow Sisters of Rossak, who kept attempting to achieve their own mental breakthrough and become Reverend Mothers.

Three hundred Navigator-candidates in the last year, and seventy-eight failures—but only twelve deaths. Normally, the medical monitors detected when a volunteer’s systems began to shut down, and they could rescue and revive the partially mutated person before the onset of death. A half-transformed Navigator could never become a normal human again, but they could serve VenHold research nevertheless. Their still-living brains were in some ways damaged, but in other ways superior, and the scientists in Josef’s Denali research facility learned a great deal from studying them.

Their grunts muffled behind sealed face masks, the two workers hauled out the limp corpse and laid it on the ground. The skin was pale and flabby, the skull elongated and distorted as if someone had fashioned it out of clay, then dropped it from a height. The body looked as if it had been partially boiled. These remnants would become a dissection specimen.

Together, Cioba and Josef Venport made a strong team. Josef was a dedicated man, but he looked at the numbers of failures and successes, seeing the scores as a balance sheet without concerning himself with mental esoterica. Given her Sisterhood training, though, Cioba knew that some answers regarding the advancement of the human mind were not clear-cut.

While the workers hauled off the corpse to be packaged and shipped on the next supply vessel to the Denali labs, Cioba went to the top of the rise and stood before the chamber that held Norma Cenva, isolated in her thoughts. Though Norma was Josef’s great-grandmother, Cioba also had a strong connection to the strange woman, directly back to their ties on Rossak.

Norma had begun her exotic transformation even before the birth of Karee Marques, Cioba’s ancestor, and Norma had her own genetic ties to the psychic-powered women of Rossak; her mother, Zufa Cenva, had been one of the most powerful Sorceresses.

Now, when Norma acknowledged her arrival, Cioba spoke her thoughts immediately. The woman in the tank no longer understood pleasantries and chitchat. “You have changed yourself into something more than human, Norma. I trust you’re aware that the Sisters of Rossak, including the last few Sorceresses, are also attempting to enhance themselves through drug-induced traumas, near-death encounters. Do you think there are any similarities with the Navigator transformation?”

Norma paused for a long moment. “All key advancements occur through crisis and survival. Without stress and extreme challenge, one cannot meet her potential.”

Norma had gone through the same cycle herself, starting as a brilliant but malformed young woman from Rossak, enduring a lifetime of withering disapproval from her mother; then she’d been captured and tortured nearly to death by one of the cymek Titans, an ordeal from which she emerged with incredible mental powers. Likewise, only at the verge of death had Raquella been able to summon her potent hidden abilities; she had uplifted her entire being, becoming a far superior woman to the one she had been before.

“I lose track of how much time has passed,” Norma said from her tank. “You have made me think of Rossak.”

“My two daughters are there,” Cioba said. “Your own great-great-granddaughters.”

“Granddaughters…” Norma said. “Yes, it would be nice to see them.”

Before Cioba could react, Norma Cenva’s tank began to shimmer, and a whirlwind surrounded them, a dizzying distortion. Cioba caught her breath, sucking in great gasps of air, struggling for her balance—then fighting against the altered, slightly higher gravity. She looked up and recognized the familiar cliff city, the expansive silvery-purple jungles that filled the fertile rift valleys, and the smoldering volcanoes that gave the horizon an ominous topography. Cioba tried to control her astonishment. They had appeared on an open observation balcony, one of the gathering places where the Reverend Mother would summon her acolytes … where Cioba had witnessed the funerals of more than a dozen young women who had not survived the testing through poison.

I’m back on Rossak!
she thought.

Her heart swelled, and she longed to see Sabine and Candys, even Karee Marques, the grandmother who had been instrumental in raising and training Cioba through her own years of Sisterhood training. The parentage of many acolytes and Sisters was hidden, so that they could focus on training rather than family matters. However, due to her Sorceress lineage, Cioba had been treated differently.

Because Norma had whisked the two of them unceremoniously away from Kolhar, Cioba still wore the business outfit she wore during all VenHold operations, but now as she looked around, she reached up, removed her scarf, and loosened her tresses to let the long dark locks flow. At present, she looked very much like one of the powerful telepathic women whose minds had obliterated countless cymeks.

The arrival of Norma and her large tank was quickly noticed, and soon Sisters crowded to the gathering balcony. Cioba identified herself to those who didn’t recognize her immediately. Norma didn’t seem to understand or notice the fuss.

Cioba raised her voice. “We are here because Norma Cenva has offered to give advice on the Reverend Mother transformations. She may be able to draw parallels with the Navigators she helps create on Kolhar.”

Reverend Mother Raquella hurried up, accompanied by Karee Marques. Cioba’s grandmother was dressed in a white worksuit stained with patches of purple, red, and blue from the berries, leaves, and fungi she encountered when foraging in the lower levels of the jungle.