Sisterhood of Dune

by Brian Herbert; Kevin J. Anderson

  Josef raised his thick eyebrows. “He needs to be encouraged, then.” He turned to the captive, who perspired heavily. Wasting water, as the desert people would think of it. “Who is in charge of your operations here on Arrakis? I would like to speak with that person.”

  When Ishanti removed the captive’s gag, the man folded his lips in distaste. “This is a free planet. You have no more rights to melange than anyone else does. Hundreds of operations worked on Arrakis during the plagues. The spice is just there for us to harvest off the ground! We made our own investment. Our work doesn’t interfere with your trade.”

  “It is my spice.” Josef didn’t raise his voice, but the anger behind it roiled like a building thunderstorm. He made a dismissive gesture. “Ishanti, learn what you can from him. It’s well within your talents. In fact, you can keep his water as the price of your service.”

  Now Ishanti smiled enough to show teeth, and she partially drew the milky-white dagger at her waist. “Thank you, sir.” She placed the gag back on the captive’s mouth, muffling his protestations, and led the struggling man away.

  It will never be possible to explain my motives to anyone, with the exception of Erasmus. We understand each other, despite our obvious differences.

  —GILBERTUS ALBANS, PRIVATE JOURNAL NOTES

  To encourage Mentat concentration, Headmaster Gilbertus Albans had built his school on the least populated continent of Lampadas. Though this was already a pastoral world, he needed a place where his instructors and students could focus on the demanding curriculum and not be distracted by external concerns.

  When choosing this world as the home of his Mentat School, he had erred by underestimating the continued strength of the Butlerian movement after the defeat of Omnius. The antitechnology fervor should have waned quickly, sputtering out through lack of passion and need, but Manford Torondo was more powerful than ever. Gilbertus had to walk a fine line.

  In the main instruction theater he stood on the stage, the focus of attention. The seats encircled him and rose steeply up to the rear. The amphitheater’s surrounding walls and ceiling were of dark, stained wood, with an artificial patina that made them look very old, with a weight of importance. Clever amplifiers carried his calm, reserved voice to all of his attentive students.

  “You must look past initial appearances.” The Headmaster gestured down to the two bodies that rested on autopsy slabs at the center of the stage. One table held a pale, naked human cadaver, head upturned and eyes closed; the dead man’s arms were extended straight at the sides. On the other table lay a deactivated combat mek, its fierce weapon arms and bullet-shaped head positioned in a similar arrangement.

  “A human and a thinking machine. Note the parallels. Study them. Learn from them, and ask yourselves: Are they really so different after all?”

  Gilbertus wore a tweedy waistcoat and trousers, and round spectacles on his narrow face, because he preferred these to medical treatments that could have improved his eyesight. His hair was thin but still the natural straw-yellow of his youth. He had to keep up appearances, and took great care to hide the fact that he was more than 180 years old now, thanks to the life-extension treatment he’d received from the independent robot Erasmus. Not a single one of the Mentat students suspected how important the machine mentor had been in his life; it would be dangerous if the Butlerians were to discover the truth about Gilbertus’s past.

  “The Jihad proved that humans are superior to thinking machines, true. But upon closer inspection, one can see the similarities.”

  Because Mentats were the human answer to computers, the antitechnology Butlerians supported his school. Gilbertus, however, had entirely different experiences with the thinking machines. He kept his opinions to himself for his own safety, especially here on Lampadas.

  Gilbertus lifted the smooth head of the combat mek and disengaged it from the neck anchor mechanism. “The robot you see here is a remnant of that conflict, and we received special dispensation to use it as a teaching tool.” (The Imperial government had posed no problems, but Manford Torondo had not been so easily convinced.)

  He lifted the cadaver’s pale right arm. “Note the musculature, compare it to the mechanical anatomy of the combat robot.”

  As the silent students watched, some intrigued and some displaying obvious horror, Gilbertus methodically removed organs from the prepped cadaver, then took out the roughly equivalent parts from the combat mek, step by step, showing the parallels. He displayed all the parts on trays next to each body, performing the autopsies simultaneously.

  For half an hour, he dissected the fighting robot, explaining how the components fit together and functioned, how the mek’s built-in weapons systems worked, expounded on their capabilities, and tied each point back to the human analog.

  His senior student, Draigo Roget, who also served as a teaching assistant, made an adjustment to the simple projector, which displayed the details of his operation to the audience. Draigo wore black clothing from head to toe, which accentuated his long, jet-black hair, black eyebrows, and dark eyes.

  The skull of the cadaver had been opened up in preparation for the class and its brain removed, and now Gilbertus exposed the combat robot’s computer processing unit. He placed the mek’s gelcircuitry core in a tray: A soft-looking metallic sphere was the counterpart to the convoluted human brain that sat in its own pan. He prodded the computer core with a fingertip. “Thinking machines have efficient memories and high-speed processing, but their capacity is a finite thing, limited by the specifications that were manufactured into it.”

  Gilbertus dissected the brain. “The human brain, on the other hand, has no known set of manufacturer’s specifications. Note the complex arrangement in this cutaway: cerebrum, cerebellum, corpus callosum, diencephalon, temporal lobe, midbrain, pons, medulla—you are all familiar with these terms. Despite the physical mass of the brain, most of the thinking and computing capacity was never used by its owner.”

  He looked up at them. “Each of you must learn to tap into what we all possess. There may be no limit to how much information our memories can hold—if we order and store it properly. At this school, we teach each student to emulate the organization and efficient calculation methods of thinking machines, and we have found that humans can do it better.”

  The students muttered, some of them uneasy. In particular, he noted the sour expression of Alys Carroll, a talented but close-minded young woman who had been raised among the Butlerians. She was one of the students Manford Torondo had assigned here; surprisingly, on a mental-skill level, Alys had done rather well.

  To build his Mentat School on Lampadas, Gilbertus had made certain sacrifices. As part of his agreement with Manford, which granted him support for the school, each year Gilbertus had to admit a specified number of trainees selected by the Butlerians. Although the Butlerians were not the best candidates, and took vital slots that might have been better suited for more talented and objective individuals, it was a concession he’d had to make.

  Gilbertus took a step back from the two specimens on the autopsy tables. “My objective is to send you out of this school with your thoughts organized and your memory capabilities expanded so that you will be more than the equal of any computer.” He gave them a paternal smile. “Is that a goal worthy of your efforts?”

  “Yes, sir!” The wave of assent traveled around the theater.

  * * *

  THOUGH THE PHYSICAL environment around the Mentat School was unpleasant—vast wetlands, swampy canals, and dangerous predators—Gilbertus knew that difficult surroundings honed the most proficient humans. Erasmus had taught him that.

  The school complex was a large cluster of interlocked, floating platforms anchored on a huge marsh lake, surrounded by undeveloped, unpopulated land. A warding shield system kept away the bothersome disease-carrying swamp insects, creating a sort of oasis for the Mentat students.

  Gilbertus crossed a floating walkway over the swamp, hardly noticing the dark-green wat
er below. He passed a floating sport court and one of the freestanding auditoriums, then entered the administration building on the perimeter of the complex, which held offices for the deans and tenured Mentat professors. The school already had more than two hundred instructors and four thousand students, a remarkable success among the many learning centers that had sprung up after the defeat of the thinking machines. Due to the rigors of Mentat instruction, the failure rate approached thirty-five percent even among the very best candidates who were accepted into the school (not counting the required Butlerian candidates), and only the best of those would advance to become Mentats.

  The biosene lamps in Gilbertus’s office emitted a faint but not unpleasant odor. The large room was appointed with a dark koagany floor and rugs woven from the leaves and bark of swamp willows. Very faintly, he heard classical music playing, some of the compositions he and Erasmus had once enjoyed in the robot’s contemplation gardens on Corrin.

  Out of nostalgia, he had made his office resemble features of the home of Erasmus on Corrin, with the same plush purple drapes and ornate furniture style. He had to be very careful, but he knew no one would ever make the connection. Gilbertus was the only human alive who remembered the lavish trappings of the independent robot’s private villa.

  Bookshelves rose to the high ceiling, built from polished wood that looked ancient; nicks and scrapes had been added during assembly to give the illusion of age. When establishing his school, Gilbertus had wanted to create the impression of a long-standing institution with gravitas. Everything about this office, the building, and the school complex had been laid out with a good deal of thought.

  And that is only appropriate, he mused. After all, we are Mentats.

  The deans and professors developed and improved innovative instructional programs to push the boundaries of the human mind, but the essence of the Mentat curriculum had come from a source known only to Gilbertus—a source that, if revealed, would put the entire school in extreme danger.

  After verifying that he was alone, Gilbertus locked the door behind him and drew down each of the wood-and-fabric blinds. Removing a key from his waistcoat pocket, he unlocked a solid wood cabinet built into one set of shelves. He reached inside and touched a panel in a precise place, causing the shelves to rearrange, spin around, and then open like the petals of a flower.

  On a shelf rested a shimmering memory core, and he said to it, “I am here, Erasmus. Are you ready to continue our conversation?”

  His pulse quickened, partly due to the emotions he felt, partly because of the risk. Erasmus was the most notorious of all independent robots, a thinking machine as hated as the evermind Omnius itself. Gilbertus smiled.

  Before the catastrophic fall of Corrin, he had removed the core from the doomed robot and smuggled it away as he mingled with countless human refugees. In the intervening years, Gilbertus had created an entirely new life for himself, a false past. He had used his talents to develop this Mentat School—with the clandestine assistance of Erasmus, who provided him with ongoing advice.

  The gelcircuitry sphere throbbed with activity, and the independent robot spoke in a familiar erudite voice through small amplifiers. “Thank you—I was beginning to feel claustrophobic, even with the hidden spyeyes you’ve allowed me.”

  “You saved me from a life of ignorance and squalor, and I saved you from destruction. A fair exchange. But I apologize that I can’t do more—not yet, anyway. We have to be very cautious.”

  Years ago, Erasmus had selected one child from the miserable slave pens on the machine world, an experiment to see if it was possible to civilize one of the feral creatures through careful training. Over the years, the independent robot became a father figure and mentor who taught Gilbertus how to organize his thoughts, and how to enhance his brain so that he could think with an efficiency formerly reserved for computers. How ironic, Gilbertus thought, that his school for maximizing human potential had its roots in the world of thinking machines.

  Erasmus was a hard but excellent teacher. The robot would likely have had success with any young human he tried to train, but Gilbertus was deeply grateful that fate had chosen him.…

  The two spoke in low tones, always apprehensive about being discovered. “I know the risks you are already taking, but I grow restless. I need a new framework, a functional body that allows me to be mobile again. I am constantly thinking of innumerable test scenarios that would yield interesting results with your cadre of students. I am certain that humans continue to do fascinating, irrational things.”

  As always, Gilbertus sidestepped the issue of creating the new body that the robot desired. “They do, Father—and unpredictable, violent things. That’s why I must keep you concealed. Of all the secrets in the Imperium, your existence is perhaps the greatest.”

  “I long to interact with humans again … but I know you are doing your best.” The machine voice paused, and Gilbertus could imagine the shifting expression on the robot’s old flowmetal face, on the body left behind on Corrin. “Take me for a walk around the room. Open one of the shades a bit so that I might peek out with my sensors. I need input.”

  Always alert, Gilbertus lifted out the lightweight core and cradled it in his hands, taking great care not to drop or otherwise damage it. He brought the sphere to one of the windows that faced the broad, shallow lake—a direction from which observers were unlikely to be watching—and lifted the blinds. He could not deny Erasmus this small favor; he owed the independent robot too much.

  The memory core chuckled, a gentle cachinnation that reminded Gilbertus of peaceful, idyllic times on Corrin. “The universe has changed much,” Erasmus mused. “But you’ve adapted. You’ve done what you needed to do to survive.”

  “And to protect you.” Gilbertus held the memory core close. “It’s difficult, but I will keep up the masquerade. You’ll be safe while I’m gone, Father.”

  Soon, Gilbertus was due to depart from Lampadas with Manford Torondo, both of them going to Salusa Secundus to address the Landsraad Council and Emperor Salvador Corrino. It was a delicate, dangerous balancing act on Gilbertus’s part … a form of acrobatics that always made him uneasy.

  Life is complicated, regardless of the circumstances into which we are born.

  —HADITHA CORRINO, LETTER TO HER HUSBAND, PRINCE RODERICK

  Pulled by four golden lions, the royal carriage led a procession through the Salusan capital city of Zimia. It was a city of monuments, honoring the numerous heroes of the long Jihad. Everywhere, Emperor Salvador Corrino saw images of Serena Butler, her martyred baby, Manion, and the Grand Patriarch Iblis Ginjo—on fluttering banners, on the sides of buildings, on statues, on storefronts. Ahead, the great golden dome of the Hall of Parliament was a reassuring presence, itself a site of epic, historical events.

  Under cloudy skies, they rolled past a towering cymek walker on display, a dented and rusting monument as high as the tallest buildings. The fearsome machine had once been guided by a human brain, part of an enemy attack force during the first Battle of Zimia. Now, the immense form was lifeless, a relic standing as a reminder of those dark days. After more than a century of Serena Butler’s Jihad, the thinking-machine forces had been entirely defeated at Corrin, and humans were no longer slaves.

  Zimia had been severely damaged twice by machine attacks in the Jihad, and on both occasions the city had been rebuilt—a testimonial to the unrelenting spirit of humanity. Out of the carnage and rubble of the Battle of Corrin, the Butler family changed their name to Corrino and rose to lead the new Imperium. The first Emperor was Salvador’s grandfather, Faykan, and then his son, Jules. The two men had ruled for a combined total of seventy-one years, after which Salvador assumed the throne.

  Inside the royal carriage, the Emperor felt irritated at the interruption to his morning schedule, but he’d received word of a grim discovery that he needed to see for himself. He had hurried from the Palace along with his entourage of royal guards, assistants, advisers, and full security (bec
ause the restless people always found something to protest). A Suk School doctor rode in the carriage behind his, just in case something went wrong. Salvador worried about a lot of things and wore his apprehension like an ill-fitting garment.

  As the procession continued, the Emperor did not particularly want to see the gruesome discovery to which they were escorting him, but it was his obligation. The lion carriages made their way toward the center of the city, past other carriages, groundcars, and trucks that pulled over to let the royal party pass.

  His ornate carriage stopped smoothly in the large central plaza, and liveried attendants hurried to open the enameled door. As they helped the Emperor out, he could already smell the stench of burned flesh in the air.

  A tall, muscular man approached in a scarlet tunic and gold trousers, the colors of House Corrino. Roderick was the Emperor’s demi-brother, sharing the same father but a different mother; the two also had a troubled half-sister, Anna, by yet another mother. (Emperor Jules had been very busy, although he’d never sired a child from his actual wife.)

  “Over here,” Roderick said in a quiet voice. He had a full head of thick, blond hair, unlike Salvador, who—two years older at forty-seven—had only a patch of wispy brown hair on top. Both men wore activated shield belts as casual items of clothing, enveloping them in a barely discernible field. The men hardly gave the ubiquitous technology any thought.

  Roderick pointed toward a statue of Iblis Ginjo, the charismatic but complex religious leader of the Jihad who had inspired billions to fight against the machine oppressors. Salvador was horrified to see a burned, mutilated body dangling from the statue. A placard was attached to the roasted, unrecognizable corpse, identifying him as “Toure Bomoko—Traitor to God and Faith.”