The Butlerian Jihad

by Brian Herbert

Selim pocketed the stone. Ignoring the jeers and insults, he continued his tedious descent toward the open desert.

  Dhartha intoned in a voice that sounded like a bass howl of storm-winds, “Selim, who has no father or mother—Selim, who was welcomed as a member of our tribe—you have been found guilty of stealing tribal water. Therefore, you must walk across the sands.” Dhartha raised his voice, shouting before the condemned man could pass out of earshot. “May Shaitan choke on your bones.”

  All his life, Selim had done more work than most others. Because he was of unknown parentage, the tribe demanded it of him. No one helped him when he was sick, except maybe old Glyffa; no one carried an extra load for him. He had watched some of his companions gorge themselves on inflated family shares of water, even Ebrahim. And still, the other boy, seeing half a literjon of brackish water untended, had drunk it, foolishly hoping no one would notice. How easy it had been for Ebrahim to blame it on his supposed friend when the theft was discovered….

  Upon driving Selim from the caves, Dhartha had refused to give him even a tiny water pouch for his journey, because that was considered a waste of tribal resources. None of them expected Selim to survive more than a day anyway, even if he somehow managed to avoid the fearsome monsters of the desert.

  He muttered under his breath, knowing they couldn’t hear him, “May your mouth fill with dust, Naib Dhartha.” Selim bounded down the path away from the cliffs, while his people continued to utter curses from above. A hurled pebble bounced past him.

  When he reached the base of the rock wall that stood as a shield against the desert and the sandworm demons, he set off in a straight line, wanting to get as far away as he could. Dry heat pounded on his head. Those watching him would surely be surprised to see him voluntarily hike out onto the dunes instead of huddling in a cave in the rocks.

  What do I have to lose?

  Selim made up his mind that he would never go back and plead for help. Instead, chin high, he strode across the dunes as far as he could. He would rather die than beg forgiveness from the likes of them. Ebrahim had lied to protect his own life, but Naib Dhartha had committed a far worse crime in Selim’s eyes, knowingly condemning an innocent orphan boy to death because it simplified tribal politics.

  Selim had excellent desert skills, but Arrakis was a severe environment. In the several generations since the Zensunni had settled here, no one had ever returned from exile. The deep desert swallowed them up, leaving no trace. He trudged out into the wasteland with only a rope slung over his shoulder, a stubby dagger at his belt, and a sharpened metal walking stick, a piece he had salvaged from the spaceport junkyard in Arrakis City.

  Maybe Selim could go there and find a job with offworld traders, moving cargo from each vessel that landed, or stowing aboard one of the spaceships that plied their way from planet to planet, often taking years for each passage. But such ships only rarely visited Arrakis, since it was far from the regular shipping lanes. And joining the strange offworlders might make Selim give up too much of himself. It would be better to live alone in the desert—if he could survive….

  He pocketed another sharp rock, one that had been thrown from above. As the mountain buttress shrank into the distance, he found a third shard that seemed like a good throwing stone. Eventually, he would need to capture food. He could suck a lizard’s moist flesh and live for just a little while longer.

  As he made his way into the restless wasteland, Selim gazed toward a long peninsula of rock, far from the Zensunni caves. He’d be apart from the tribe there, but could still laugh at them every day he survived his exile. He could thumb his nose and call out jokes that Naib Dhartha would never hear.

  Selim poked his walking stick into the soft dunes, as if stabbing an imaginary enemy. He sketched a deprecating Buddislamic symbol in the sand, with an arrow on it that pointed back toward the cliff dwellings. He took a special satisfaction from his defiance, even though the wind would erase the insult within a day. With a lighter step, he climbed a high dune and skidded down into the trough.

  He began to sing a traditional song, maintaining an upbeat composure, and increased his speed. The distant peninsula of rock shimmered in the afternoon, and he tried to convince himself that it looked inviting. His bravado increased as he drew farther from his tormentors.

  But when he was within a kilometer of the sheltering black rock, Selim felt the loose sand tremble under his feet. He looked up, suddenly realizing his danger, and saw ripples that marked the passage of a large creature deep beneath the dunes.

  Selim ran. He slipped and scrambled across the soft ridge, desperate not to fall. He kept moving, racing along the crest, knowing that even this high dune would prove no obstacle for the oncoming sandworm. The rock peninsula remained impossibly far away, and the demon came ever closer.

  Selim forced himself to skid to a halt, though his panicked heart urged him to keep running. Worms followed any vibration, and he had run like a terrified child instead of freezing in place like the wily desert hare. This behemoth had certainly targeted him by now. How many others before him had stood terrified, falling to their knees in final prayer before being devoured? No person had ever survived an encounter with one of the great desert monsters.

  Unless he could fool it…distract it.

  Selim willed his feet and legs to turn to stone. He took the first of the fist-sized stones he carried and hurled it as far as he could into the gully between dunes. It landed with a thump—and the ominous track of the approaching worm diverted just a little.

  He tossed another rock, and a third, in a drumbeat pattern intended to lure the worm away from him. Selim threw the rest of his stones, and the beast turned only slightly, rising up in the dunes close to him.

  Empty handed, he now had no other way to divert the creature.

  Its maw open wide, the worm gulped sand and stones, searching for a morsel of meat. The sand beneath Selim’s boots shifted and crumbled at the edge of the worm’s path, and he knew the monster would swallow him. He smelled an ominous cinammon stench on the worm’s breath, saw glimpses of fire in its gullet.

  Naib Dhartha would no doubt laugh at the young thief’s fate. Selim shouted a loud curse. And rather than surrender, he decided to attack.

  Closer to the cavernous mouth, the odor of spice intensified. The young man gripped his metal walking stick and whispered a prayer. As the worm lifted itself from beneath the dune, Selim leaped onto its curved and crusty back. He raised the metal staff like a spear and plunged the sharpened tip into what he thought would be tough, armored worm-skin. Instead, the point slipped between segments, into soft pink flesh.

  The beast reacted as if it had been shot with a maula cannon. It reared up, thrashed, and writhed.

  Surprised, Selim drove the spear deeper and held on with all his strength. He squeezed his eyes shut, clenching his teeth and pulling back to keep himself steady. He would have no chance if he let go.

  Despite the worm’s violent reaction, the little spear couldn’t have wounded it; this was merely a human gesture of defiance, a biting fly thirsty for a sweet droplet of blood. Any moment now the worm would dive back beneath the sand and drag Selim down with it.

  Surprisingly, though, the creature raced forward, keeping itself high out of the dunes where the exposed tissue would not be abraded by sand.

  Terrified, Selim clung to the implanted staff—then laughed as he realized he was actually riding Shaitan himself! Had anyone ever done such a thing? If so, no man had ever lived to tell about it.

  Selim made a pact with himself and with Buddallah that he would not be defeated, not by Naib Dhartha and not by this desert demon. He pulled back on his spear and pried the fleshy segment even wider, making the worm climb out of the sand, as if it could outrun the annoying parasite on its back….

  The young exile never made it to the strip of rock where he had hoped to establish a private camp. Instead, the worm careened into the deep desert…carrying Selim far from his former life.

 
We learned a negative thing from computers, that the setting of guidelines belongs to humans, not to machines.

  —RELL ARKOV,

  charter meeting of the League of Nobles

  After being rebuffed on Salusa Secundus, the thinking-machine fleet headed back to their distant base on Corrin. There, the computer evermind would not be pleased to hear the report of failure.

  Like lapdog servants to Omnius, the remaining neo-cymeks followed the defeated robot fleet. However, the six survivors of the original Titans—Agamemnon and his elite cadre—prepared a diversion. It was an opportunity to advance their own schemes against the oppressive evermind….

  While the dispersed battleships made their way through space carrying the vigilant watcheyes, Agamemnon discreetly flew his own ship on a different course. After escaping the Salusan Militia, the cymek general had transferred his brain canister from a soot-scarred mobile warrior-form to this sleek armored vessel. Despite the defeat, he felt exuberant and alive. There would always be other battles to fight, whether against feral humans or against Omnius.

  The ancient cymeks maintained com-silence, worried that a stray electromagnetic ripple might be detected by an outlying ship in the retreating machine fleet. They plotted a faster, more dangerous route that took them closer to celestial obstacles avoided by the risk-averse robot vessels. The shortcut would buy the secretly rebellious cymeks enough time to meet in private.

  As their course intercepted a simmering red dwarf star, the Titans approached a misshapen, pockmarked rock that orbited close to the dim sun. There, a sleet of stellar wind and ionized particles, coupled with strong magnetic fields, would hide them from any robotic scans. After a thousand years of serving Omnius, Agamemnon had learned ways to outwit and sidestep the accursed evermind.

  The six cymeks vectored in toward the planetoid using their human skills instead of computerized navigation systems. Agamemnon chose a site within a yawning crater, and the other Titans dropped beside his vessel, finding stable terrain on a rippled plain.

  Inside his ship, Agamemnon guided mechanical arms that lifted his enclosed brain canister from its control socket and installed it into another mobile terrestrial body with a set of six sturdy legs and a low-slung body core. After connecting the thoughtrodes that linked his mind through electrafluid, he tested his gleaming legs, lifting the metal pads and adjusting the hydraulics.

  He walked his graceful mechanical body down the ramp onto the soft rock. The other Titans joined him, each wearing a walker body with visible internal workings and life-support systems impervious to the blazing heat and radiation. The bloodshot dwarf star loomed overhead in the black, airless sky.

  The first of the surviving Titans came forward to touch sensor pads against the general’s mechanical body, delicate probings in a romantic caress. Juno was a strategic genius who had been Agamemnon’s lover back when they had worn human bodies. Now, a millennium later, they continued their partnership, needing little more than the aphrodisiac of power.

  “Will we move forward soon, my love?” Juno asked. “Or must we wait another century or two?”

  “Not so long, Juno. Not nearly so long.”

  Next came Barbarossa, the closest thing to a masculine friend Agamemnon had known for the past thousand years. “Every moment is already an eternity,” he said. During the Titans’ initial takeover, Barbarossa had discovered how to subvert the Old Empire’s ubiquitous thinking machines. Luckily, the modest genius had also had the foresight to implant deep programming restrictions that prevented thinking machines from doing any outright harm to the Titans—restrictions that had kept Agamemnon and his cymek companions alive after the evermind’s treacherous takeover.

  “I can’t decide if I’d rather smash computers or humans,” Ajax said. The most powerful enforcer of the old cymeks, the brutal bully clomped forward in a particularly massive walker-form, as if still flexing the muscles of his long-ago organic body.

  “We must cover our tracks twice for every plan we make.” Dante, a skilled bureaucrat and accountant, had an easy grasp of complex details. Among the Titans, he had never been dramatic or glamorous, but the overthrow of the Old Empire could not have been achieved without his clever manipulations of clerical and administrative matters. With none of the bravado of the other conquerors, Dante had calmly worked out an equitable division of leadership that had permitted the Titans to rule smoothly for a century.

  Until the computers had wrested it all from them.

  The disgraced Xerxes was the last cymek to clamber into the sheltered crater. The lowliest Titan had long ago committed the unforgivable mistake that allowed the ambitious newborn computer mind to hamstring them all. Although the Titans still needed him as part of their ever-dwindling group, Agamemnon had never forgiven him for the blunder. For centuries, miserable Xerxes had had no other desire than to make up for his error. He foolishly believed that Agamemnon might embrace him again if he could find a way to redeem himself, and the cymek general made use of such enthusiasm.

  Agamemnon led his five co-conspirators across the terrain to the crater shadows. There, the machines with human minds faced each other among broken rocks and half-melted boulders to speak their treason and plot revenge.

  Xerxes, despite his flaws, would never betray them. A thousand years ago, after their victory, the original Titans had agreed to surgical conversion rather than accept their mortality, so that their disembodied brains could live forever and consolidate their rule. It had been a dramatic pact.

  Now, Omnius occasionally rewarded loyal human followers by converting them to neo-cymeks, as well. Across the Synchronized Worlds, thousands of newer brains with machine bodies served as indentured servants to the evermind. Agamemnon could not rely upon anyone who willingly served the evermind, however.

  The cymek general transmitted his words on a tight waveband that tapped directly into the Titans’ thought-processing centers. “We are not expected back on Corrin for weeks. I have seized this opportunity so that we may plan a strike against Omnius.”

  “It’s about time,” Ajax said, his voice a deep grumble.

  “Do you believe the evermind has grown complacent, my love—like the humans of the Old Empire?” Juno asked.

  “I have noted no particular sign of weakness,” Dante interjected, “and I keep careful track of such things.”

  “There are always weaknesses,” Ajax said, twitching one of his heavy armored legs and gouging a hole in the ground, “if you’re willing to use enough muscle to exploit them.”

  Barbarossa clacked one of his metal forelegs on the hard rock. “Do not be fooled by artificial intelligence. Computers do not think like humans. Even after a thousand years, Omnius will not let his attention wander. He has enough processing power and more watcheyes than we can count.”

  “Does he suspect us? Does Omnius doubt our loyalty?” Xerxes already sounded worried, and the meeting had just begun. “If he thinks we are plotting against him, why won’t he just eliminate us?”

  “Sometimes I think you have a leak in your brain canister,” Agamemnon said. “Omnius has programming restrictions that prevent him from killing us.”

  “You don’t have to be insulting. It’s just that Omnius is so powerful, you’d think he could override whatever Barbarossa loaded into his system.”

  “He hasn’t yet, and never will. I knew what I was doing on that job, believe me,” Barbarossa said. “Remember, Omnius yearns to be efficient. He will take no unnecessary actions, will not waste resources. We are resources to him.”

  Dante said, “If Omnius is so intent on ruling efficiently, then why does he keep human slaves around at all? Even simple robots and minimal-AI machines could perform their tasks with less bother.”

  Agamemnon paced out of the thick shadows into harsh light, and then back again. Around him, the conspirators waited like huge insects made of scrap metal. “For years, I have been suggesting that we exterminate the human captives on the Synchronized Worlds, but Omnius refuses.”r />
  “Maybe he’s reluctant because humans created thinking machines in the first place,” Xerxes suggested. “Omnius might see humans as a manifestation of God.”

  Agamemnon chided him. “Are you suggesting that the computer evermind is devoutly religious?” The disgraced cymek quickly fell silent.

  Barbarossa said, like a patient teacher, “No, no—Omnius simply doesn’t wish to expend the energy or cause the turmoil that such an extermination would bring about. He sees humans as resources, not to be wasted.”

  “We’ve been trying to convince him otherwise for centuries,” Ajax said.

  Aware that their safe window of time was rapidly dwindling, Agamemnon pushed the discussion forward. “We must find some way to spark a radical change. If we shut the computers down, then we Titans rule once more, along with any neo-cymeks we can recruit.” He swiveled his sensor-turret. “We’ve taken charge before and must do it again.”

  Previously, when the human Titans had consolidated the stagnant Old Empire, combat robots had done the bulk of the fighting for them. Tlaloc, Agamemnon, and the other rebels had simply picked up the pieces. This time the Titans would have to fight for themselves.

  “Maybe we should try to find Hecate,” Xerxes said. “She’s the only one of us who has never been under Omnius’s control. Our wild card.”

  Hecate, the former mate of Ajax, was the sole Titan who had relinquished her rule. Before the thinking machine takeover, she had departed into deep space, never to be heard from again. But Agamemnon could never trust her—even if she could be located—any more than he trusted Xerxes. Hecate had abandoned them long ago; she was not the ally they needed.

  “We should look elsewhere for assistance, take any help we can find,” Agamemnon said. “My son Vorian is one of the few humans allowed access to the central complex of the Earth-Omnius, and he delivers regular updates to the everminds on other Synchronized Worlds. Perhaps we can use him.”

  Juno simulated a laugh. “You want to trust a human, my love? One of the weak vermin you despise? Moments ago you wanted to exterminate every member of the race.”