Every step of the way, Thurr had made wrong decisions.
In Erasmus’s laboratories, he had found a kindred spirit in Rekur Van. He and the limbless Tlulaxa researcher had combined their knowledge and destructive appetites into horrifically imaginative schemes against the weakling humans— and oh, how they deserved their fates. Once Erasmus had declared the limb-regeneration experiments a failure, Rekur Van had harbored no aspirations of escaping. But Thurr could be free to roam the habitable planets and make his mark… if ever he could get away.
He stared up into the sky. Not likely anytime soon.
The intriguingly unpredictable robot Erasmus visited him, bringing his companion, Gilbertus Albans. The robot seemed to understand Thurr’s frustration, but could offer no hope for freedom from Corrin. “Perhaps you can develop an innovative idea that will fool the League watchdog fleet.”
“As I did with the plagues? As I did with the recent targeted projectile factories? I hear they succeeded in breaking through the cordon.” He gave a thin smile. “I shouldn’t have to solve all of our problems— but I will if I can. I want to get out of here more than any of you machines.”
Erasmus wasn’t convinced. “Unfortunately, now the Army of Humanity will be even more vigilant.”
“Especially after the mechanical devourers reach their targets and begin to work.” More than anything else, Thurr wished he could be there himself to witness the mayhem.
Erasmus turned to his straw-haired, muscular companion. Thurr resented the robot’s “pet,” because Gilbertus had received the immortality treatment while he was still young enough to benefit from it.
“And what do you think, Gilbertus?” the robot asked.
Blandly, the other man turned to look at the bald man as if he were no more than a failed experimental specimen. “I think Yorek Thurr operates too close to the fringe of human behavior.”
“I agree,” Erasmus said, apparently delighted with the assessment.
“Even if that is so,” Thurr sneered, “I am still within the realm of humanity, and that you can never understand, robot.” When he saw that Erasmus was taken aback, Thurr felt a great satisfaction.
It wasn’t freedom, of course, but at least he had achieved a small victory.
As long as Earth, our Mother and our birthplace, remains in the memory of the human race, it is not completely destroyed. At least we can try to convince ourselves of that.
— PORCE BLUDD,
The Mapping of Scars
The long succession of atomic strikes had taken a terrible toll on Quentin Butler. Almost two decades later, the former commander still could not pass a night without dreaming of the uncounted billions of humans he had annihilated, all for the sake of defeating the thinking machines.
He was not the only one who wondered if the luckiest jihadi soldiers had been those who perished swiftly and cleanly, lost in the mysterious maze of foldspace. It was far worse, Quentin thought, to have to live with the knowledge, to stare at the permanent bloodstains on his hands.
It was the price he had to pay. For the honor of all his victims, he had to endure it. And never forget.
People still called him a hero, but it no longer made him proud. League historians remembered, and embellished, virtually everything he had accomplished in his military career.
But the real Quentin Butler was little more than an empty shell, a hardened, hollow statue formed of memories, expectations, and horrendous losses. After what he’d been forced to do, his heart and his soul had left him. He watched Faykan and Abulurd continue with their lives; Faykan had married, started a fine family, while his younger brother remained single. Perhaps Abulurd wouldn’t continue the Harkonnen name in his offspring after all.
Quentin felt as empty as his cataleptic wife Wandra, who remained alone and unaware in the City of Introspection, year after year. At least she was at peace. At times when he visited her, Quentin would look into her blank but beautiful face and envy her.
After experiencing so much, after making so many difficult decisions, he’d had enough of military service. He had spearheaded too many attacks, sending too many fighters to their deaths, along with all of the innocent human captives, whom he should have been able to liberate from machine oppression. In reality, he had freed them from Omnius only by slaughtering them.
Quentin could no longer live with that. For years after the Great Purge, he had served in meaningless posts and then shocked his oldest son by attempting to resign his commission.
In response, trying to keep his war-hero father close by, Faykan suggested he accept a post as an ambassador or a representative in Parliament.
“No, that is not for me,” Quentin had said. “I have no interest in beginning another career at my age.”
But the Grand Patriarch— still Xander Boro-Ginjo— had read a prepared statement that someone else had undoubtedly written for him, refusing to accept the primero’s resignation, altering it instead to a well-deserved indefinite leave of absence. Quentin didn’t care about the semantics, for the result would be the same. He had found another calling.
His friend Porce Bludd, a fine companion from Quentin’s happier days as a lowly soldier and engineer working to build New Starda, offered to take him along on a pilgrimage and expedition.
In the years since the Omnius Scourge and the Great Purge, the philanthropist nobleman had become obsessed with the idea of helping planets. On Walgis and Alpha Corvus, two cauterized former machine worlds, he had found a few ragtag survivors living in squalor. The people were desperately in need, disease-ridden and starving, exhibiting numerous forms of cancer caused by the nuclear fallout. Their civilization, technology, and infrastructure had been obliterated, but the hardiest souls still clung to life, cobbling together support networks.
Bludd had returned to the League, seeking volunteers and organizing huge airlifts and rescue convoys to deliver supplies to the survivors. In the worst cases, they moved entire villages to less contaminated areas or off the planet to more hospitable League Worlds. With the human population scattered and devastated in the aftermath of the retrovirus epidemic, new bloodlines were welcomed, especially by the Sorceresses of Rossak.
Some stern politicians insisted that liberation from the machines was the best compensation any survivors could ask for. More and more, Quentin realized that the men who made such sweeping pronouncements had never been the ones who offered the sacrifices in the first place….
Bludd, who had no need to fight for political gains, simply turned his back on the League Parliament when they refused to offer reparations. “I will give the aid that I deem necessary,” he’d said in an announcement in Zimia. “I don’t care if I spend every cent of my fortune. This is my calling in life.”
Although much of the incredible family wealth had been lost in the slave revolt that destroyed much of Starda and killed Bludd’s granduncle, vast sums continued to pour into Poritrin’s coffers from the burgeoning market for personal protective shields. It seemed everyone around the League was wearing them now, even without the threat of an outside machine enemy.
Hearing of Quentin’s leave of absence, the nobleman sought him out. “I don’t know if you will want to see them with your own eyes,” Bludd said, his expression filled with compassion, “but I intend to go to planets devastated in the Great Purge. Former Synchronized Worlds. The atomic blasts were enough to destroy ecosystems and eradicate the scourge of Omnius, but there’s a chance”— his eyes brightened as he extended a finger— “a chance, I tell you, that some humans survived. If so, we must find them and help them.”
“Yes,” Quentin said, feeling a weight lift from his shoulders. He dreaded the prospect of going to the nuclear wastelands, where he had dropped a storm of atomic warheads himself. But if there was some small way he could make amends…
Bludd’s luxurious space yacht contained more amenities than a League battleship, with living quarters, a large cargo hold loaded with medicines and relief supplies, and a one-man scou
t flyer in the hangar. At first Quentin refused to take advantage of comforts he felt he didn’t deserve, but in the end he convinced himself to enjoy the trip. He had served enough missions over the course of his military career, devoting forty-two years of his life to Serena Butler’s Jihad.
On their long voyage, Quentin and Bludd traveled to pinpoints on a map that had once marked known Synchronized Worlds; all radioactive hotspots. Nineteen years ago, Quentin had flown from planet to planet, dropping cargoes of death. Now his mission was one of compassion and commemoration.
Quentin stared down at the ruined landscape of Ularda, the burned ground, the stunted trees and plants that grew in the contaminated soil. Most buildings had been leveled by the pulse-atomic explosions, but the handful of survivors had stacked up rubble to form huts and cottages, scant shelters from the fearsome post-holocaust storms that ripped across the plains.
“Do you ever get used to scenes like this?” Quentin swallowed the lump forming in his throat.
In the pilot’s seat, Bludd looked at him with emotion-filled eyes. “Let us hope not. For the sake of our own humanity, we dare not become used to such things.”
As their yacht cruised overhead, they saw people below working with sticks and scrap metal to till fields. Quentin could not imagine how they lived. The survivors stopped and stared upward— some waving and cheering, others dropping their tools and running for shelter, afraid that the strange airship signaled a return of machine forces to complete the extermination of the human race.
Tears streamed down the Poritrin nobleman’s face. “I wish I could pack every single person aboard this ship and deliver them directly to a League World, where they could have a chance. With all my wealth and influence, I should be able to save everybody.” He swiped a hand across his eyes, and it came away wet. “Don’t you think so, Quentin? Why can’t I save everybody?”
Quentin’s heart was heavy, and the guilt was like a cancer eating through his body.
Though the background radiation affected their scanning systems, Bludd was able to detect three squalid settlements. All told, fewer than five hundred had survived the bombardment. Five hundred… out of how many millions?
Then the thoughts of a military commander intruded. If five hundred fragile human beings could endure the pulse-atomic holocaust, what if a protected copy of the evermind had escaped destruction? Quentin shook his head. He had to believe the atomic attacks had succeeded— because if even one intact evermind could propagate across other planets, then all of this death and destruction would have been for nothing.
He squeezed his eyes shut as Bludd landed the ship at one of the three settlements. The men suited up in protective garments and stepped out to look at the battered and squalid scarecrows who managed to scrape out a subsistence on what had once been a Synchronized World. Only the strongest could survive here; most people died horribly and young.
Surprisingly, the two men were not the first to arrive on Ularda in the years since the Great Purge. After meeting with the town elders— elders? The oldest looked barely forty!— Quentin discovered that the Cult of Serena had taken root here, spread by two proselytizing missionaries trained by his granddaughter Rayna. Even in their difficult circumstances, these people eschewed technology, viewing the atomic attacks as just punishment for the thinking machines.
In places such as this, where the minuscule population was hurting the most and had nothing left to sacrifice, fanatical religions took hold easily. The Cult of Serena, evolved from the original Martyrists, gave these broken survivors a tangible scapegoat, a focus for their anger and despair. Rayna’s message, disseminated by the visitors, commanded them to smash all machines and never allow computer minds to be developed or used by humanity again.
Quentin respected her philosophy of teaching people to live by their own wits and resources. Yet the harsh and inflexible message worried him. In twenty years, even on League planets that had suffered from the Scourge but not nuclear destruction, the antitechnology crusade had been accepted with great fervor. People shunned machines in all their guises. Spaceships, in the service of their antimachine crusade, were apparently exempt from their fanaticism.
Now, in the small village on Ularda, the natives wore stained and tattered garments; matted hair had fallen out in clumps; sores and growths dotted their faces and arms.
“We’ve brought you food and medicines, supplies and tools to make your lives better,” Bludd said. His radiation-blocking suit crinkled as he moved. The people looked at him hungrily, as if they might rush forward, a starving mob. “We will bring more when we can. We’ll dispatch help from the League. You have already proven your bravery and resourcefulness just by surviving. From this point forward, things will get better for you, I promise.”
He and Quentin unloaded cases of concentrated foods, vitamins, and medicines. Next, they brought out sacks of high-yield crop seeds along with farming implements and growth-enhancing fertilizers. “I promise it will get better,” Bludd repeated.
“Do you really believe that?” Quentin asked when the two men returned to their ship, weary and distraught from the horrors they had seen.
Bludd hesitated, again avoided the easy answer. “No… I don’t believe it— but they have to.”
* * *
PERHAPS IT WAS a symbolic journey, a need to witness the first great battlefield against the machines and the birthplace of the human race. Bludd announced that he intended to go to Earth.
“It’s doubtful there will be survivors,” Quentin said. “It has been too long.”
“I know,” the Poritrin lord said. “Both of us were too young for that first victory… the start of this exhausting Jihad. Still, I feel that as a human being, I must see it for myself.”
Quentin looked at his friend’s eyes and saw the deep need there. He, too, felt it in his heart. “Yes, I think we both should go to the birthplace of humanity. Maybe we can learn something. Or maybe by looking at its scars, we can find a way to get through the rest of our work.”
But there was no life to be found on Earth.
As he navigated his space yacht over the silent and blistered landscape, Bludd and Quentin searched for any enclave of humanity that had somehow escaped the nuclear bombardment. Here, where cymeks and Omnius had methodically obliterated every vestige of humanity, the League Armada had dropped enough atomic weapons to sterilize the surface of the whole planet: No one was left alive. They orbited repeatedly, hoping to find a reason to doubt their initial reports, but Earth was nothing more than a horrific, charred scar.
Quentin finally left the bridge. “Let us go somewhere else. Someplace where there might be a glimmer of hope.”
Some say it is better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven. That is a defeatist attitude. I intend to rule everywhere, not just in Hell.
— GENERAL AGAMEMNON,
New Memoirs
It was time for changes— they were long overdue, in fact. Perhaps they had all the patience in the universe, but nineteen years was surely long enough.
Agamemnon hauled his enormous walker to the top of the windswept glacier. Abrasive snow and breezes whipped across the uneven terrain, and starlight reflected under the bruised skies of Hessra. The light on the frozen planetoid was as dim as the cymeks’ prospects had been. Until the Purge.
Juno clambered up beside him, her immense shape exuding power and ambition. Articulated legs rose and fell, powered by durable engines. Because the Titans had lived for so long, they tended to lose track of their goals, letting each day slip away from them, and now it was growing too late.
He and his beloved companion stood together, immune to the inhospitable cold. Behind them, the half-buried towers of the Cogitors’ fortress looked like a crumbling monument to lost glory— reminding Agamemnon of gaudy shrines and memorials he had forced slaves to build for him on Earth.
“You are the lord of all you survey, my love,” Juno said.
He couldn’t tell if she was teasing him or admiring his
minuscule victory. “It is pathetic. After all, we have nothing to fear. The League can barely wipe their own noses, and they eradicated Omnius on every Synchronized World except Corrin, where he hides behind all his weapons.”
“As we are hiding here?”
“Why? There is no longer any reason for it.” With a heavy metal limb, he smashed a crater into the ice in front of him. “What is to stop us now?”
Inside his mind, Agamemnon’s thoughts rumbled like distant thunder. He found it shameful that he had allowed his own dreams to fade— perhaps he should simply have died like so many of his coconspirators. After nearly nine decades of their new rebellion against Omnius, the general and his handful of surviving cymeks had accomplished little and were hiding like rats in holes.
“I grow weary of this,” Agamemnon said. “All of it.”
He and Juno understood each other well. It surprised him that the ambitious female Titan had remained with him for more than a millennium. Perhaps it was only because she had no other viable options… or perhaps she really cared for him.
“What precisely are you waiting for, my love? Such complacency has turned us into apathetic lotus-eaters, just like the population of the Old Empire we despised so much. We have been sitting around for all these years like…” Her voice grew full of self-derision. “Like Cogitors! The galaxy is an open field for us— especially now.”
With his optic threads, Agamemnon scanned the lifeless mountain-scape, the inexorable tides of ice. “There once was a time when thinking machines served us. Now Omnius has been destroyed and the hrethgir are weakened— we should take advantage of that. But there is still a significant chance we will fail.”
Juno’s voice was thick with scorn, prodding him as always. “When did you become a frightened child, Agamemnon?”
Dune: The Battle of Corrin Page 30