Dune: The Butlerian Jihad (74 page)

Before the City of Introspection became fully awake, Serena quietly went to the outbuildings and found a small groundcar. She didn’t want to disturb her mother. Raising her chin in determination, Serena refused to delay. It had been long enough already.

Climbing into the vehicle, she went through the motions of powering up the familiar engines. She knew where she had to go. Serena rode off through the open gates, heading down the road toward the Tantor estate, where Xavier had made his home. She hoped she would find him there. . . .

Emil Tantor opened the heavy wooden door and looked at her with astonishment. “We were delighted to hear of your return!” His brown eyes were as kind and warm as she had remembered.

Gray wolfhounds barked inside the foyer and slipped past Emil to bound in circles, greeting Serena. Despite the dread in her heart, she smiled. A wide-eyed boy came out to look at her. “Vergyl! You’ve grown so much!” She fought a swell of sadness at the vivid reminder of how long she had been away.

Before the boy could answer, Emil gestured her inside. “Vergyl, please take the dogs outside so this poor woman can have a bit of quiet, after what she’s been through.” He gave her a small, deeply compassionate smile. “I didn’t expect you to come here. Would you have a glass of morning tea with me, Serena? Lucille always brews it strong.”

She hesitated. “Actually, I need to see Xavier. Is he back yet? I need to—” The old man’s startled expression stopped her. “What is it? Is he all right?”

“No, no, Xavier is fine, but . . . he isn’t here. He went directly to your father’s estate.” Emil Tantor seemed to have more to tell her, but his voice trailed off.

Troubled by his reaction, Serena thanked him and ran back to her groundcar, leaving the old man standing at the wooden door. “I’ll see him there, then.” Xavier probably had business with her father. Perhaps they were already planning to aid the human rebels on Earth.

She drove to the familiar manor house atop the high hill, surrounded by vineyards and olive groves. Her heart ached as she slowed to a halt by the main entry.
Home
. And Xavier was here.

She parked near the wellspring and breathlessly approached the front door. Her eyes were stinging, her legs trembling. She could hear her pulse pounding in her ears. Greater even than the guilt she bore or the fear of what she must say, was a longing to be with her lover again.

Xavier opened the door even before she reached it. At first his face seemed like a sunrise, nearly blinding her. He looked older, stronger, more handsome than he had even in her fantasies. She wanted to melt.

“Serena!” He gasped, then grinned and swept her into his arms. After only a moment he pulled away awkwardly. “I knew you were at the City of Introspection, but I didn’t realize you had recovered yet. I just returned in the middle of the night, and I, uh—” He seemed to be fumbling for words.

“Oh, Xavier, it doesn’t matter! I needed to be with you so badly. There is so much . . . so much to tell.” All at once the magnitude of what she needed to say seemed to crush her shoulders. Her voice caught.

He stroked her cheek. “Serena, I already know the terrible news. I’ve heard about . . . our son.” He looked at her with sadness and pain, but a firm acceptance.

When they stepped into the foyer, Xavier withdrew to an awkward distance, as if facing her was more difficult than confronting all the forces of the machine armies. “It has been so long, Serena, and everyone thought you were dead. We found the wreckage of your ship, analyzed the blood samples, confirmed your DNA.”

She reached out to clasp his hand. “But I survived, my love! I thought of you constantly.” Her eyes searched his face for answers. “My memories of you were all I had to sustain me.”

Finally, his words falling like heavy stones, he said, “I am married now, Serena.”

Her heart seemed to stop beating. Serena took a halting step backward, and bumped into a small table, which toppled over with a crash, spilling a vase and fresh red roses, like blood on the tile floor.

She heard hurried footsteps from the main sitting room. The slight figure of a young woman appeared, with long hair and large eyes, rushing toward her. “Serena! Oh, Serena!” Octa carried a bundle in her arms, held close to her bosom, but she managed to give her sister a fierce hug anyway.

Overjoyed, Octa stood beside her husband and her sister, but as she looked from one to the other, her happy expression crumbled into embarrassment and shame.

The bundle stirred in Octa’s arms, and made a soft sound. “This is our daughter Roella,” she said, almost apologetically, and drew aside the cloth to show Serena the child’s beautiful face.

An image flashed through Serena’s mind: her terror-stricken son only seconds before Erasmus dropped him from the high balcony. The baby girl Octa held looked remarkably like little Manion, who had also been Xavier’s child.

In stunned disbelief, Serena stumbled toward the door, her world crashing down around her. She whirled and ran off like a wounded fawn.

E
arth remained the flaming heart of rebellion even without the charismatic Iblis Ginjo. Thrust into the center of the struggle, the Cogitor’s secondary Aquim tried to keep the resistance alive and organize the ill-planned fight in the face of Omnius’s increasingly violent retaliation.

Aquim had always been a man of contemplation, mulling over Eklo’s esoteric revelations in the high monastery towers. He had forgotten how to deal with destruction and bloodshed. While he had a network of contacts through his relationship with Eklo, only rarely were they fighters. For the most part, these people were deep thinkers who came up with so many options to consider that they could not move quickly. The situation at hand was outdistancing them.

Mobs ruled with very little leadership.

Surprised and overwhelmed at the realization that they had broken free after centuries of oppression, the rebels had no focus or goal— only a raw, unchanneled need for revenge. Once unleashed, these slaves could never turn back. Even Iblis had not made long-term plans. Fires raged across the city grids. Factory and maintenance buildings exploded as saboteurs brought down the manufacturing and support capabilities of Omnius. Arson and vandalism spread across the continents from industrial centers to human settlements.

The evermind unleashed his cymeks, activated his ranks of warrior robots. The entire planet became a battleground . . . and not long afterward, a charnel house. Thinking machines had no capacity for forgiveness.

Unfettered at last, Agamemnon and his bloodthirsty cymeks marched into human habitation camps and razed them to the ground. For the first time since the Titans had been overthrown by the evermind, Omnius’s diversified fighters were bound together by a rapacious enthusiasm for vengeance. Cymeks sprayed poison gas, acid plumes, and ribbons of molten fire.

Robotic extermination squads moved from gutted buildings to squalid shelters and pens. Crops were burned, food-distribution depots leveled. Even those who survived the mechanical onslaught would starve within months.

Ten thousand slaves paid in blood for every robot or cymek damaged. No humans could escape with their lives. None were meant to.

HIGH IN THE isolated mountains, the Cogitor’s tower trembled like a living creature. Pieces of stone flaked away. On the uppermost level, where Eklo’s ancient brain rested in its preservation canister, the exterior windows changed color from yellow to orange.

A distraught Aquim dipped his fingers into the electrafluid, connecting his thoughts to those of the revered Cogitor. “I gave them your message, Eklo. The Titan Juno is coming. She wishes to speak with you.”

“As she did, long ago.”

Wishing to put an end to the bloodshed, Eklo had asked to see the Titans, hoping there would be some way to reason with them. Long ago, the Cogitor had unwittingly aided Juno and her companions in their overthrow of the Old Empire, and Eklo’s disembodied brain had been the inspiration for the Titans to convert themselves into cymeks.

In those days he had been a spiritual human named Arn Eklo, philosopher and orator who had fallen to the diversions of sexual pleasures. In his shame and dismay, he had met Kwyna and her metaphysical scholars who wanted to eliminate all distractions in order to develop their thinking powers. Eklo’s physical form, the petty desires of his body, became unimportant to him, nothing in comparison to unraveling the mysteries of the universe.

His orations became different after that, exceedingly cerebral, so that many people could not understand him. His followers began to drift away, and the business investors in the congregation, seeing the dramatic decline in revenues, questioned him. They didn’t understand what he was saying either.

Then one day, Arn Eklo simply disappeared. As a group, he and the other Cogitors planned to embark on an epic journey to the deep reaches of the spiritual realm. Far beyond the bounds of flesh.

Since undergoing the remarkable surgery, his mind had lived for more than two thousand years separated from the weaknesses and limitations of his human body. At last, he and Kwyna and the other Cogitors had all the time anyone could need. It was the greatest gift any of them could have received.
Time
.

Now Aquim interrupted his ponderous thoughts. “Juno is here.”

With his canister resting on a ledge of the high tower, Eklo observed a massive cymek warrior-form easily climbing the steep mountain path.

“Give Juno this message,” Eklo said to Aquim. Below, numerous secondaries appeared to be in a frenzy, hurrying toward the stairs that led to the top of the tower. “Tell her nothing is impossible. Tell her that love is what separates humans from other living creatures, not hatred. Not violence—”

The windows turned bloodred, and powerful explosions ripped through the tower. Juno raised her cannon forelimbs and launched a volley of projectiles, pummeling the reinforced monastery structure until the tower crumbled.

The ceiling collapsed, and Aquim threw himself forward, trying to shield the preservation canister and the magnificent brain of the ancient Cogitor. But the avalanche came down, crushing everything. . . .

After the tower had tumbled into a dusty heap, Juno used her mechanical arms to tear through the rubble, knocking stones and girders aside. She crawled over the wreckage, discarding the broken bodies of secondaries until finally she found the preservation canister. The dead monk Aquim and the curved plexiplaz tank had kept the Cogitor’s brain from being pulverized, but the container was cracked. Bluish electrafluid dripped into the dirt and debris.

Juno tossed Aquim’s body away like a limp doll. Then she extended a flowmetal hand, extruding long and sharp fingers into the broken container to retrieve the puckered grayish mass of the Cogitor Eklo. She sensed faint flickers of energy from the quivering brain.

She decided to send him on another journey, even farther from the realm of flesh. Her flowmetal hand clenched, squeezing the spongy gray matter into dripping pulp.

“Nothing is impossible,” she said, then swiveled about and marched back toward the city grid and her important work.

WITHOUT EMOTION— ONLY a desire to rid himself of a problem— Omnius decreed the complete annihilation of all human life on Earth.

His robotic forces proceeded relentlessly, going about their bloody task with few impediments. Ajax’s bloodbath on Walgis during the long-ago Hrethgir Rebellions had been merely a brief prelude.

After the evermind determined that it had no further use for the humans on this planet, he made similar assessments for all of the other Synchronized Worlds. Despite the fact that humans had originally created thinking machines, the unruly biologicals had always been more trouble than they were worth. At last he agreed with Agamemnon, who had been urging such a final solution for centuries. Omnius would extinguish the human species.

The remaining four Titans, assisted by neo-cymeks and modified robotic soldiers, spent months hunting down and slaughtering the planetary population. Not a single person on Earth survived.

The bloodshed was unspeakable, and much of it was recorded by the ever-present watcheyes of the evermind.

A
s much as he hated Naib Dhartha, Selim retained a curiosity about how the people of his former village continued to live their lives. He wondered if they had erased him from their memories by now. Sometimes he went over their actions in his mind and grew furious, but then he would smile. Buddallah had kept Selim alive, given him a mysterious vision and a blessed purpose.

Previous generations of Zensunni had adapted their way of life to the desert. In such a hostile environment there was little room for change or flexibility, so the nomads’ day-today existence remained much the same year after year.

However, as Selim observed his former comrades, he noticed that Naib Dhartha had a new priority in life. The rigid tribal leader had launched upon some unusual scheme that involved taking large teams of workers out into the open desert. The scavengers no longer combed the wasteland for a few pieces of scrap metal or abandoned technology. Now the Zensunni villagers hurried out into the sands with one purpose only:
to gather spice
.

Just like in his vision! The nightmare began to make sense: the spice taken offworld by outsiders, causing a storm that would sweep away the harsh serenity of the great desert. Selim would watch and understand . . . and then he would determine what he needed to do.

With delicate footsteps, the villagers wandered onto the open dunes, making quick excursions out to the rust-colored stains of melange spread by occasional spice blows. Gently easing metal stakes deep into the sand, they lashed up thin camouflaged tents and awnings against the blowing sand and the hot sun. They posted a watch on the high dune crests for approaching worms.