Sandworms of Dune

by Brian Herbert

  From all directions, Face Dancers rallied against the humans, while combat robots turned their attention to the destructive sandworms. The first ranks of shape-shifters advanced with blank and unreadable faces, armed with machine-designed weaponry.

  When the first canisters of Scytale’s curling, gray-green gas landed among them, the frenzied Face Dancers did not understand what was happening. Soon they began to fall, writhing, their faces melting off their bones. Sensing the danger too late, they scrambled to retreat as Sheeana’s fighters launched more poison gas into their midst.

  The Bene Gesserits continued to push forward. Their demolition crews planted mines against looming buildings that could not uproot themselves in time. Powerful explosions brought down the shuddering metal towers. Sheeana rushed her teams to shelter until the thunderous collapses were over. Then they surged forward again.

  Duncan decided to hang back. In the center of the city, the huge, bright cathedral drew him like a beacon, as if all the intensity of the evermind’s thoughts were being channeled through it. He knew Paul Atreides was in that structure, perhaps fighting for his life, perhaps dying. Jessica was inside, as well. Compelling instincts born of memories from his first life told Duncan where he had to go. He needed to be at Paul’s side in the den of the Enemy.

  “Keep the machines occupied, Sheeana. Even the evermind can’t fight on an infinite number of fronts at once.” He jerked his head toward the cathedral building. “I’m going there.”

  Before she could say anything, Duncan ran off.

  Enduring my own mistakes once was bad enough. Now I am condemned to relive my past, over and over.

  —DR. WELLINGTON YUEH,

  interview notes taken by Sheeana

  The Suk doctor, in a teenage body but with the burdens of a very old man, knelt by the dying Paul. Although he had administered every emergency treatment at his disposal, he knew he could not save the young Atreides. With specialized skill, he had halted most of the bleeding, but now he shook his head sadly. “It’s a mortal wound. I can only slow his death.”

  Despite the betrayal in his past life, Yueh had loved the Duke’s son. In those bygone days he had been a teacher and mentor to Paul. He had seen to it that the boy and his mother had a chance of surviving in the deserts of Arrakis after the Harkonnen takeover, so long ago. Even with his full Suk knowledge restored, Yueh didn’t have the facilities to help this Paul. The knife had penetrated the pericardium, cut into the heart. Through sheer tenacity the young man still clung to a thread of life, but he had already lost far too much blood. His heart was stuttering its last few beats.

  Despite the chances offered by a second lifetime, Yueh was unable to escape his previous failures and betrayals. He had been suffering inside, wallowing in the cesspool of his past mistakes. The Sisters on the no-ship had resurrected him for some secret purpose that he had never been able to fathom. Why was he here? Certainly not to save Paul. That was out of his hands now.

  On the no-ship he had tried to take action by doing what he thought was necessary and right, but he had only caused more tragedy, more pain. He had killed an unborn Duke Leto rather than another Piter de Vries. Yueh knew he had been manipulated by the Rabbi/Face Dancer, but he could not accept that as an excuse for his actions.

  Chani sat on the floor at Paul’s side, calling his name in an unfamiliar husky voice. Yueh sensed that something about her had changed; her eyes had a wild steeliness much different from the gaze of the sixteen-year-old girl he knew.

  He realized with a start that the horror of holding Paul’s bloody, dying body in her arms must have pushed her over the edge. Chani had her original memories back—just in time to experience the full magnitude of her imminent loss. Even Yueh reeled from the cruelty of it.

  The Baron made despairing sounds of his own, at first confused, then angry, and now desperate. “Paolo boy, answer me!” He crouched by the glassy-eyed young man, raging. He raised a hand as if to strike the warped copy of Paul Atreides, but Paolo didn’t flinch.

  From one side the independent robot Erasmus watched the whole scenario with intent curiosity, his optic threads glistening. “Apparently, neither of the Paul Atreides gholas is the Kwisatz Haderach we expected. So much for the accuracy of our predictions.”

  The moment he saw the Baron’s growing confusion, Yueh knew that only one thing remained for him to do. Struggling to regain his composure, he rose from the side of the dying Paul and made his way over to the Baron and Paolo. “I am a Suk doctor.” His sleeves and trousers were drenched in Paul’s blood. “Perhaps I can help.”

  “Eh? You?” The Baron sneered at him.

  Jessica glared after the doctor, and the restored Chani looked as if she wanted to flog Yueh for leaving Paul’s side. But he concentrated only on the Baron. “Do you want me to help, or not?”

  The Baron moved out of the way. “Hurry, then, damn you!”

  Going through the motions, Yueh bent and passed his hands over Paolo’s face, felt the cold clamminess of the skin and the barely discernible pulse. Young Paolo sat frozen and transfixed, staring into a coma of infinite awareness and paralyzing boredom.

  The Baron leaned close. “Make him snap out of it. What is the matter with him? Answer me!”

  Grabbing the Emperor’s dagger from Paolo’s waistband, Yueh spun in a single fluid movement. The Baron staggered back, but Yueh was quicker. He thrust the sharp tip at an angle under the hateful man’s chin and rammed it all the way to the back of his skull. “This is my answer!”

  The answer for being coerced into betraying House Atreides, for all the schemes, the pain, the resultant guilt, and most of all for what the Harkonnens had done to Wanna.

  The Baron’s eyes opened wide in shock. He flailed his hands and tried to speak, but could only gurgle helplessly as a crimson geyser spouted from his neck.

  Spattered in blood, Yueh jerked the Emperor’s dagger back out. He considered plunging it into Paolo’s midsection, just to be certain he killed both of them. But he couldn’t do that. Though the boy had gone wrong, this was still Paul Atreides.

  The Baron collapsed onto the hard floor. All the while, the Paolo ghola continued to stare upward without blinking.

  Dr. Wellington Yueh allowed himself a relieved smile. At long last he had accomplished something positive and true. Finally, he had done something right. For a long moment he held the dagger, covered with the Baron’s blood as well as Paul’s. A potent impulse prompted him to turn the point toward himself. Yueh closed his eyes, clutched the handle of the knife, and took another deep breath.

  A firm hand clasped his wrists, staying his suicide thrust. He opened his tear-filled eyes to see Jessica standing beside him. “No, Wellington. You don’t need to redeem yourself like that. Help me save Paul instead.”

  “There is nothing I can do for him!”

  “Don’t underestimate yourself.” Her facial muscles tightened. “Or Paul.”

  No education, training, or prescience can show us the secret abilities we contain within ourselves. We can only pray those special talents are available in our time of greatest need.

  —The Bene Gesserit Acolytes’ Handbook

  Death.

  Paul skirted the edge of the interior blackness, dipped briefly into infinity, and danced back out. He wavered on the balance point of his own mortality. The knife wound was deep.

  Without any awareness of what was going on around him, he felt an intense coldness spreading from the tips of his fingers to the back of his head. Like a distant whisper, he could still hear the lava fountain blazing nearby. Despite the hard stone floor beneath him, Paul felt as if he were floating, his spirit drifting in and out of the universe.

  His skin detected a warm, syrupy wetness. Not water. Blood . . . his own . . . spreading in a great pool across the floor. It filled his chest, mouth, and lungs. He could hardly breathe. With each feeble heartbeat, more of it spilled out, never to be retrieved. . . .

  It seemed as if he could still feel the long
blade of the Emperor’s knife inside him. Now he remembered. . . . In the last desperate days of Muad’Dib’s jihad, the conniving Count Fenring had stabbed him. Or had that occurred at a different time? Yes, he had tasted a knife blade before.

  Or maybe he was the old blind Preacher in the dusty streets of Arrakeen, stabbed by yet another knife. So many deaths for one person . . .

  He couldn’t see. Someone squeezed his hand, though he could barely feel it, and he heard a young woman’s voice. “Usul, I am here.” Chani. He remembered her most of all, and was glad she was here with him. “I am here,” she said. “All of me, with all my memories, beloved. Please come back.”

  Now a firmer voice yanked his attention, as if strings were attached to his mind. “Paul, you must listen to me. Remember what I taught you.” His mother’s voice. Jessica . . . “Remember what the real Lady Jessica taught the real Paul Muad’Dib. I know what you are. You have the power within you. That is why you aren’t dead yet.”

  He found words within his throat, and they bubbled up through the blood. He was amazed at the sound of his own voice. “Not possible . . . I’m not . . . the Kwisatz Haderach—the ultimate . . .” He was not the superbeing that would change the universe.

  Paul’s eyes flickered open, and he saw himself lying in the great machine cathedral. That part of the prescient dream had been true. He had seen Paolo laughing with victory and consuming the spice—but now Paolo himself rested on the floor like a fallen statue, frozen and mindless, gazing into infinity. The Baron lay dead, murdered with a look of disbelief and annoyance on his pasty face. So the vision was true, but all the details had not been available to him.

  Some kind of commotion came from beside Omnius and Erasmus, and Paul looked there, his gaze bleary. Watcheyes flitted in, displaying images. The old man stood with an impatient expression on his face. The Face Dancer Khrone seemed unsettled. Paul could hear voices shouting. The whole cacophony wove itself in oddly incomprehensible strands through the buzzing tapestry in his head.

  “Sandworms attacking like demons . . . destroying buildings.”

  “. . . a rampage . . . armies emerging from the no-ship. A poisonous gas that kills—”

  The old man said drily, “I have dispatched combat robots and Face Dancers to fight them, but it may not be sufficient. The sandworms and the humans are causing considerable damage.”

  Erasmus picked up the conversation. “Rally more Face Dancers, Khrone. You didn’t send all of them out.”

  “That is a waste of my people. If we fight the humans, their poison kills us. If we go out to battle sandworms, we will be crushed.”

  “Then you will be poisoned, or crushed,” Erasmus said lightly. “No need to fret. We can always create more of you.”

  The Face Dancer’s features shifted and blurred, a storm crossing his putty face. He turned and marched out of the vaulted chamber.

  Meanwhile Yueh raised Paul’s head, ministering to him with Suk medical techniques. But Paul folded his eyes shut again and dropped backward into the pain. Again he danced along the edge of the chasm that opened wider and wider before him.

  “Paul.” Jessica’s voice was insistent. “Remember what I told you of the Sisterhood. Maybe you aren’t the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach that the thinking machines want, but you are still a Kwisatz Haderach. You know that, and your body knows it as well. Some of your powers are the same as those of a Reverend Mother. A Reverend Mother, Paul!”

  But he found it too difficult to concentrate on her words, or to remember . . . As he spiraled deeper and deeper into unconsciousness, her voice faded, and he could not hear or feel his heartbeat anymore. What did his mother mean?

  If Jessica now remembered her past life, she also remembered the Spice Agony. Any Reverend Mother had the innate ability to shift her biochemistry, to manipulate and alter molecules within her bloodstream. It was how they selected their pregnancies, how they transmuted the poisonous Water of Life. That was why the Honored Matres had searched so furiously to find Chapterhouse—because only Reverend Mothers had the physical ability to fight off the terrible machine plagues.

  Why did his mother want him to remember that?

  Trapped inside the darkness, Paul felt the emptiness of his body. Completely bled out. Silent.

  On Arrakis so long ago, he had undergone his own version of the Agony, the first male ever to do so successfully. For weeks he had lain in a coma, declared dead by the Fremen, while Jessica insisted on keeping him alive. He had seen that stygian place where women could not go, and he had drawn strength from it.

  Yes, Paul had that ability within him now. He was a male Bene Gesserit. He could still control his body, every cell, every muscle fiber. At last, he knew what his mother had been trying to tell him.

  The pain of dying and the crisis of survival gave him the lever he needed. He stood upon his pain as a fulcrum and used it to pry open his life, his first existence—the memories of Paul Atreides, of Muad’Dib, of himself as Emperor and later as the Preacher. He followed that flood backward to his childhood and his early training with Duncan Idaho on Caladan, including how he had almost been killed as a pawn in the War of Assassins that had ensnared his father.

  He remembered his family’s arrival on Arrakis, a place Duke Leto knew to be a Harkonnen trap. The memories rushed past Paul: the destruction of Arrakeen, his flight into the desert with his mother, the death of the first Duncan Idaho . . . meeting the Fremen, his knife fight with Jamis, the first man he had ever killed . . . his first worm ride, creating the Fedaykin force, attacking the Harkonnens.

  His past accelerated as it flowed through his mind—overthrowing Shaddam and his empire, launching his own jihad, fighting to keep the human race stable without traveling down that dark path. But he had not been able to escape political struggles, assassination attempts, the exiled Emperor Shaddam’s bid for power and the pretender daughter of Feyd-Rautha and Lady Fenring . . . then Count Fenring himself had tried to kill Paul—

  His body no longer felt empty, but full of experiences and great knowledge, full of abilities. He remembered his love for Chani and his sham marriage to Princess Irulan, as well as the first Duncan ghola named Hayt, and Chani dying while giving birth to the twins, Leto II and Ghanima. Even now, the pain of losing Chani seemed far greater than the pain he presently suffered. If he died now, in her arms, he would inflict that same anguish upon her.

  He remembered wandering off into the desert, blinded from prescience . . . and surviving. Becoming the Preacher. Dying in a dusty street surrounded by a mob.

  He was now everything he had once been: Paul Atreides and all the different guises he had worn, every mask of legend, every power and weakness. Most important of all, he now had the abilities of a Reverend Mother, the infinitesimal physical control. Like a beacon in the darkness, his mother had enabled him to see.

  Between his last heartbeats, he searched within himself in the deep and drowning place. He found the knife wound inside his heart, saw the mortal damage, and discovered that his body’s defenses were incapable of repairing the grievous injuries on their own. He needed to direct the healing process.

  Although in the preceding moments he had seemed to be fading, he now sharpened himself and became part of his own heart, which was no longer beating. He saw where Paolo’s blade had slashed open his right ventricle, letting blood spill out of the chamber. His aorta had been nicked, but there was no more blood for it to carry.

  Paul brought the cells together and sealed them. Then, droplet by droplet, he began to draw his own blood back from the cavities of his body where it had spilled, and reabsorbed it into his tissues. He literally pulled life back into himself.

  PAUL DIDN’T KNOW how long his trance lasted. It seemed as infinite as the death coma caused by touching just a drop of the poisonous Water of Life to his tongue. He became suddenly aware of Chani’s grip again. Her hand was warm, and he felt his own flesh, no longer cold and shuddering.

  “Usul!” He could hear Chani’s faint wh
isper and detected the disbelief in her tone. “Jessica, something’s changed!”

  “He is doing what he needs to do.”

  When he finally summoned the strength to flutter his eyelids, Paul Muad’Dib Atreides rejoined the living, bringing with him both his old life and his new. In addition to those memories and abilities, he returned with a fantastic, even greater revelation. . . .

  Just then, a flushed and bloodied Duncan Idaho burst into the great cathedral hall, knocking sentinel robots aside. Erasmus casually gestured to allow the man to enter. Duncan’s eyes went wide when he saw the bleeding Paul propped up by his mother and Chani. Dr. Yueh looked astonished at the miracle before him. Duncan ran toward them.

  Trying to pull together his thoughts, Paul placed the tableau around him in the context of his internal knowledge. He had learned much by dying the first time, coming back as a ghola, and nearly dying again. He had always had a phenomenal gift for prescience. Now he knew even more.

  In spite of his miraculous survival and rebirth, he still was not the perfect Kwisatz Haderach, and clearly Paolo was not, either. As Paul’s vision cleared, he focused on a realization that none of them had seen—not Omnius, Erasmus, Sheeana, nor any of the gholas.

  “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.