Sandworms of Dune

  "Duncan," he said in a hoarse voice. "Duncan, it's you!"

  After hesitating for a moment, his old friend came closer, this loyal Atreides fighter who had been through the ghola process more times than any other individual in history.

  "You're the one they've been looking for, Duncan. It's you."

  Even prescience has its limits. No one will ever know all the things that might have been.

  --REVEREND MOTHER DARWI ODRADE

  With her arm around his shoulders, Chani rocked Paul, as she shuddered with joy and relief. Fremen prohibitions were so much a part of her that even after seeing his mortal wound and watching him come within a heartbeat of dying in her arms, she still had not shed a tear.

  In the machine cathedral, Duncan wrestled with the revelation that the pale and bloodied Paul had given him. "I . . . am the Kwisatz Haderach?"

  Paul nodded weakly. "The final one. The perfect one. The one they were looking for."

  The old-man manifestation of Omnius gave the robed form of the independent robot an accusing look. "If this claim is correct, you were in error, Erasmus. You did not allow for the humans to twist fate yet again. You said your predictive calculations were accurate."

  The robot remained aloof, even smug. "Only your interpretation of my calculations was flawed. The final Kwisatz Haderach was indeed aboard the no-ship, as I said all along. You drew the obvious conclusion that the one we sought must be Paul Atreides. When the Face Dancer found the bloody knife carrying the cells of Muad'Dib, you falsely reinforced your own conclusion."

  Duncan's mind wanted to reject what he was hearing. Even if he truly was the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach, what was he to do with the knowledge?

  The old man sneered down at the frozen, useless boy Paolo and the dead Baron. "All that work on our own clone gave us no advantage. Extremely wasteful."

  Erasmus shaped his flowmetal face into a sympathetic expression and addressed the recent arrival. "I knew I was drawn to you for a reason, Duncan Idaho. If you really are the Kwisatz Haderach, you stand in a position to alter the course of the universe. You are a living watershed, the harbinger of change. You can choose to stop this conflict that has made enemies of humans and thinking machines for thousands of years."

  Duncan realized that Yueh, Jessica, Chani, and Paul had all played their parts, and now the focus had shifted to him.

  Erasmus stepped closer to them. "Kralizec means the end of many things, but that end need not be destructive. Just a fundamental change. Henceforth, nothing will be the same."

  "Not destructive?" Jessica raised her voice. "You said your thinking-machine ships are attacking worlds in the Old Empire. You've already sterilized and conquered hundreds of planets!"

  The robot seemed unperturbed. "I did not say our approach was the only way, or even the best one." The old man glowered at Erasmus as if he had been insulted.

  Suddenly the sky above the great machine city was torn by multiple booms of displaced air as a thousand Guild Heighliners appeared like storm clouds. Emerging from foldspace, the fleet of huge vessels easily carried enough weaponry to level the continent.

  Omnius's old man guise flickered as his concentration was wrenched by the dramatic shift. Across the city of Synchrony, robots buzzed about, fighting the sandworms that continued to rampage. Now they had to shore up defenses against the new enemy overhead.

  Inside the vaulted building, Erasmus altered his form again to the kindly old woman, as if he believed this presentation more convincing and compassionate. "I've run probabilities beyond the limits of my original calculations. I believe you have the power, Duncan Idaho--stop these Guildships from destroying us."

  "Oh, please stop prattling," Omnius said.

  Duncan looked around, crossed his arms over his chest. "I am not afraid of the Guild and their Navigators. If I have to die to end this, I'm willing to do so."

  Yueh added bravely, "Everyone here has died before."

  "It doesn't matter. Let them destroy Synchrony." The old man did not seem overly disturbed. "I am dispersed across many locations. Annihilating this entire planet, this node, will never eradicate me. I am the evermind, and I am everywhere."

  A crack sounded at the center of the wide cathedral hall. Then, with a blur and a bang of folded space, an image appeared above the bloodstained floor. The shimmering transmission appeared to be solid one moment and a staticky ghost the next. In moments, the shape clarified to a beautiful and statuesque human woman with classically perfect features. Then she shifted to become stunted and dwarfish, with a blunt, unattractive face, short arms and legs, and an overly large head. After another flicker, the image was nothing more than a disembodied face that wavered in the air. It was as if she could not remember exactly what she was supposed to look like.

  Duncan immediately knew who--or what--this was. "The Oracle of Time!"

  The face swiveled to scan the people and robots in the great hall, before the image hovered closer to him. "Duncan Idaho, I have found you. I searched for years, but your no-ship and your own . . . strangeness protected you."

  Duncan no longer questioned the bizarre storm of occurrences around him. "Why did you come now?"

  "You emerged from your no-ship only once before on the planet Qelso, but I did not follow you swiftly enough. I sensed you again when your no-ship was damaged and captured. Now, with the thinking machines attacking, I was able to trace the lines of the evermind's tachyon web and follow Omnius to you. I brought my Navigators with me."

  "What is this apparition?" the evermind demanded. "I am Omnius. Begone from my world!"

  "Once I was called Norma Cenva. Now I am exponentially more than that--far beyond anything a computer network can comprehend. I am the Oracle of Time, and I go where I please."

  In the old crone guise, Erasmus reached out like a curious child and touched, but the wrinkled hand passed through her image. "So many of the most interesting humans are women," he mused. The robot experimentally waved fingers through her ghostly likeness, stirring without altering it. She ignored him.

  "Duncan Idaho, you have finally come to your realization. Kwisatz Haderach, I tried to protect you. Before you, Paul Muad'Dib and his son Leto the God Emperor were imperfect prophets. Even they realized their flaws. Now through a confluence in the cosmos, the nexus of all nexuses, you have become the singularity in a bold new universe, the vital point from which everything flows outward for the rest of eternity. The hopes of humankind--and much more--are distilled in you."

  Still taken aback, Duncan asked, "But how? I don't feel that different."

  "The Kwisatz Haderach is a 'shortening of the way,' a figure powerful enough to force a fundamental and necessary change that alters the course of future history, not just for humanity but for thinking machines as well."

  "Yes, you have the power, Duncan Idaho." Erasmus sounded just as encouraging as the Oracle. "I rely on you to make the correct choice. You know what will benefit the universe most, and you know that thinking machines can enrich the entirety of civilization."

  Duncan marveled at the awareness of his new identity and the unfolding of his thoughts around the astounding truth. Finally, after so many attempts at life in ghola form, he knew his destiny. His mind was fully awakened.

  He saw time as a great ocean stretching across the cosmos, and with his awakening powers he envisioned being able to analyze each molecule, each atom and subatomic particle. Perfect prescience would come, but not yet, not too fast or it would induce the same crippling paralysis that had befallen Paolo. Already Duncan's mind could go much faster than a Mentat's, and he sensed he could make his body move at speeds that would have astonished even the Bashar.

  I am the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach. There will be no more after me.

  The Oracle's image flickered, shifting her shape back to that of the beautiful woman. "After you died the first time, Duncan Idaho--as a soldier fighting to save the Atreides, fighting to save the first Kwisatz Haderach--the powers of the universe compelled your resur
rection as a ghola, and many times afterward, over and over. The original God Emperor understood some of your destiny and played an unwitting role in bringing about this moment. The end point of his Golden Path is the beginning of something else."

  "I am linked to the Golden Path?"

  "You are, but you are destined to go far beyond it."

  Paul seemed to be swiftly recovering his strength. Beside him, Jessica said to the otherworldly visitor, "But Duncan was part of no formal breeding program! How did he develop into a Kwisatz Haderach?"

  The Oracle continued, "Duncan, with each rebirth, you came closer to completion. Instead of being developed in a breeding program, you went through a process of personal evolution. With every successive incarnation you acquired more knowledge, skills, and experience--as if a sculptor with a tiny chisel was chipping away at a large block of hard stone, slowly, ever so slowly, fashioning a perfect statue. In your one body, you manifested a tachyon evolution, a hyperfast developmental journey that propelled you toward your destiny."

  Duncan had lived his life repeatedly for thousands of years. Not only had the Tleilaxu tinkered with his genetics to give him abilities to fight the Honored Matres, they had combined his cells so that he retained all of his previous lives, every one of them. With all those memories, he possessed a breadth of experience and wisdom that no one could match. This Duncan Idaho had more knowledge than the most advanced Mentat or the evermind Omnius, and more understanding of human nature than even the great Tyrant Leto II.

  Duncan was the same person again and again, perfecting himself, constantly filtering out impurities, like passing through a fine mesh strainer to sift out only the best of qualities, leaving him as the One. He allowed himself a secret smile at the irony. He had succeeded only because of the meddling of the Tleilaxu, though he was certain that the Masters had never intended to create a savior for humanity.

  Duncan's Mentat mind burned through the data, confirming his conclusion, knowing that the Oracle of Time must be correct. "Truly, I am the Kwisatz Haderach!" He wished Miles Teg could have been there with him. "And what of the great war--Kralizec?"

  "We are in the midst of it now. Kralizec is not merely a war, but a point of change." Her image flickered. "And you are the culmination of it."

  "But what about the rest of humanity?" Murbella. "They need to know. How will they understand what has happened?"

  "My Navigators will inform them, perhaps even bring their leaders here. First, however, I need to eliminate a threat that should have been gone millennia ago. An enemy I fought ten thousand years before you were first born."

  The Oracle slid through the air toward the indignant-looking old man, Omnius. Facing him, she made her voice boom more loudly than the evermind's speakers ever had. "I must ensure that the thinking machines can no longer harm anyone. That was my mission ages ago, when I was merely a woman, when I invented the concept of the foldspace engine, when I discovered the mind-expanding powers of melange. I shall remove you, Omnius."

  The evermind laughed, a remote old man's chuckle. The slightly stooped manifestation suddenly grew larger, looming like a giant over her image. "You cannot remove me, for I am not a corporeal being. I am information, so my existence has spread anywhere the tachyon net stretches. I am everywhere."

  The female image formed a smile. "And I am more than that. I am the Oracle of Time. Now hear my laughter." In an eerie voice Norma Cenva chuckled long and hard, causing even the oversized Omnius to take a step backward. "I am heard across star systems and eons, across time and space, far beyond the range of your net."

  Omnius took another step backward.

  "First I crippled your fleet. Now I will rip you out like the weed that you are, and discard you."

  "Impossible--" The old man began to dissolve as he retreated into his own network.

  "I will extract you--every shred of information from every node." Her misty image became amorphous and seeped around Omnius. He nearly staggered into Erasmus, but the independent robot easily slid out of the way, his old-woman face expressing curiosity and bemusement.

  "I will take you to a place where such information is no longer comprehensible, where physical laws do not apply."

  Duncan heard the evermind's voice cry out in rage, but it was muffled. In the vaulted hall, the insectile sentinel robots who tried to move forward in the service of Omnius seemed strangely disoriented and sluggish.

  "There are many universes, Omnius. Duncan Idaho has visited more than one, and he knows the place of which I speak. I rescued him and his no-ship from it long ago. You, however, will never find your way back."

  Duncan considered the incomprehensible struggle before him. Indeed, when he had first stolen the no-ship from Chapterhouse, he had lurched through the fabric of space in a desperate attempt to avoid capture and had taken them to a bizarrely skewed universe. He shuddered to think of it.

  "Nothing shall rescue you, Omnius."

  "Impossible!" the old man bellowed, losing his physical form and becoming no more than a spangled outline.

  "Yes, impossible. Wonderfully so."

  The air in the chamber crackled with clouds of electricity that spread thinner and thinner, as the Oracle wrapped herself like a net around the iconic thinking machine. For an instant, Duncan saw Norma's face superimposed over that of the old man. The two countenances merged into one: Hers. The beautiful woman smiled, and the air filled with sparkling, hair-fine strands of electricity that she drew around her like an elegant cloak.

  Then she uprooted herself from reality and vanished into the incomprehensible void, taking with her all traces of Omnius.

  Forever.

  You see enemies everywhere, but I see only obstacles--and I know what to do with obstacles. Either move them or crush them, so that we can be on our way.

  --MOTHER COMMANDER MURBELLA,

  address to the combined Sisterhood

  Even after the Navigators destroyed the bulk of the Enemy fleet in a flurry of unexpected Obliterators, a second wave of machine ships advanced toward Chapterhouse.

  The Oracle, upon locating Duncan Idaho and the lost no-ship, had promptly taken most of her Heighliners to Synchrony, only assigning a small percentage to aid in the defenses of other human-inhabited planets. With the outcome of those missions unknown, some or all of the other planets could still be vulnerable. One thing was certain: At Chapterhouse, Murbella and her defenders faced the remaining machine ships alone. Through it all, the Mother Commander didn't have much time to process her shock at discovering that Duncan was still alive.

  Administrator Gorus groaned. "Will they never stop?"

  "No." Murbella scowled at him for forcing her to state the obvious. "They are thinking machines."

  High over the Bene Gesserit world, her hundred last-stand vessels hung surrounded by the debris from thousands of destroyed machine battleships. This fight had inflicted a substantial toll on the Enemy, but unfortunately it was not enough.

  The new wave of Omnius vessels would not thumb their noses at the human defenders, as the first had. Murbella expected no mercy this time and didn't have much hope for the last-stand ships at other strategic points, either. The machines intended to annihilate Chapterhouse and every other world that stood in their way.

  She cursed the clumsy, uncooperative Guild vessels that the Junction shipyards had produced and the worthless weapons the Ixians had supplied. She had to think of something on her own. "I won't just let our ships sit here with their throats bared, like lambs waiting for slaughter!"

  "The mathematical compilers controlled our foldspace guidance and standard--"

  She shouted at Gorus. "Rip out those damned navigation devices--we'll maneuver our vessels by hand!"

  "But we will not know where we are going. We could crash!"

  "Then we must crash into the Enemy, instead of each other." She wondered if the machines would feel a need for vengeance when they saw the wreckage of the first wave. Honored Matres certainly would.

 
The Enemy kept coming. Murbella studied the complex tactical projections. Surely they did not need such a vast number of vessels to conquer the minimally inhabited Chapterhouse. It seemed obvious that the evermind had learned the value of intimidation and showmanship, as well as the wisdom of redundancy.

  In the Heighliner control center, two Guildsmen argued with Gorus. One claimed that disconnecting the mathematical compiler was impossible, while the other warned that it was unwise. Murbella ended the debate with the compelling power of Bene Gesserit Voice. The Guildsmen shuddered and, unable to resist her, did as she commanded.

  Although the machine forces outgunned them by a substantial margin, Murbella did not flinch from what had to be done. Instead, she allowed herself to reawaken her old Honored Matre anger. This was not a time to calculate odds. It was a time to unleash every bit of destruction her people could muster. Their chances were better now than they had been when this last stand began. If they all embraced viciousness and fought like frenzied Honored Matres, they could inflict significant damage. They might still go down in flames, but if they bought sufficient time for the Oracle and her Navigators to defeat Omnius, Murbella would count it a victory. She just wished she could have seen Duncan one more time.

  Murbella turned toward the broad projection plate that magnified the oncoming vessels. "Arm all weaponry and stand ready to ram. The moment we deplete conventional armaments, our own ships will become the final weapons. A hundred of us will take out at least as many of their ships."

  Up to this point, Gorus had called her battle strategy suicidal. Now, he looked as if he might try something foolish to stop her. "Why not negotiate with them? Would it not be preferable to surrender? We cannot stop them from destroying their targets!"

  Murbella fixed her gaze on the Administrator as if he were weak prey. Even the Sisters who had started out as pure Bene Gesserits now reacted with a feral Honored Matre strength. They would never back down.

  "And you base this suggestion on the success of your emissaries to the thinking machines? All those emissaries who disappeared?" Murbella's voice sizzled like hot acid. "Administrator, if you'd like to seek another solution, I would be happy to eject you from an airlock and let you fly across the empty vacuum. As the last breath explodes out of your lungs, maybe you can gasp out your personal surrender terms. Be my guest, if you believe the thinking machines will listen to you."