Sisterhood of Dune

by Brian Herbert; Kevin J. Anderson

  The roundabout route required several different transfers, and he was forced to travel aboard an old-model cargo vessel operated by Celestial Transport. After the terrible accident that cost his uncle’s life, Griffin was reluctant to deal with CT, but the next available ship would have taken him six more weeks to get to Kepler. He didn’t want to be gone for that long.

  Upon arriving at his destination he saw a group of large, well-armed warships circling in orbit, keeping watch like fierce guardians. According to reports, Vorian Atreides had arranged the military protection from Emperor Salvador. Griffin narrowed his eyes, feeling a flash of annoyance. He didn’t know the details, but assumed the arrangement involved bribes, coercion, and calling in special favors. The Atreides patriarch manipulated people in power so easily.

  By contrast, the Corrino Emperor had never bothered to station any defenses above Lankiveil.…

  Kepler’s small spaceport was little more than a landing field and a transfer station out to one of the continent’s fourteen inhabited valleys. Weller had once told him, “The only way to get answers is by asking questions.” Everyone from lowly refueling technicians to the on-duty administrator of spaceport operations was delighted to talk about Vorian Atreides, whose identity had now been exposed. For years, apparently, he had lived a quiet life here, pretending to be a simple man, well liked by his family and his neighbors. Now, after what he had done in securing protection for Kepler, they regarded him as a hero, celebrating his accomplishments and applauding all he had done for the planet and its people.

  A cargo handler had the most to say. “When slavers raided Vorian’s valley and captured his friends and family, he took his own ship and raced to rescue them! The rest of us had given up. What can you do after a slave raid? But he found a way!” As he spoke, the loquacious man operated a control panel, moving suspensor-borne crates of cargo from the supply shuttle to large delivery trucks. “Yes, sir, Vorian followed the slavers to Poritrin and used his own fortune to buy back the captives—not just his own family members, but everybody. Then he went to Salusa and forced the Emperor to guarantee our protection. The man was already legendary for his exploits in the Jihad, and this only adds to his incredible legacy of selfless acts.”

  The cargo handler pointed a finger toward the sky. “We got those warships up there because Vorian Atreides demanded them from the Emperor. No one else could have done it except the former Supreme Bashar of the Army of Humanity. But Vorian—ah, he is still a man to be reckoned with.”

  “Yes, it sounds like he is,” Griffin said, frowning. Could this be the same man he had heard about all his life, the monster who would stab his best friend Xavier Harkonnen in the back?

  When she sent her message, Valya had neglected to mention the reason Vorian Atreides had come to the Imperial Court in the first place, that he was apparently on a mission of mercy to protect his adopted planet. She must have known that.

  “I’d like to meet him,” Griffin said, beginning to feel a little uncertain about the nature of his enemy. Apparently, the man was not all black or white, though that did not diminish his treachery against House Harkonnen. “In fact,” Griffin said, “I have connections with him that go way back. Where does he live? He hasn’t gone back into hiding, has he?”

  “Everyone knows the village where he’s lived all these years.” The cargo handler paused while the crates floated beside him. He wiped a thick hand across his sweaty forehead, then provided the name of a valley, along with vague directions. It was enough for a start. From what Valya had told him and what Griffin had seen in the historical record, his prey did not avoid calling attention to himself if the opportunity arose.

  A woman in the admin office gave him more detailed guidance, and then he arranged for transport out to the valley. His heart was pumping with anticipation. When Valya entrusted this task to him, placing the obligation on his shoulders, she had not seemed to consider it an overly difficult mission.

  But did she really expect him to walk up to the man and simply kill him? That seemed no more honorable than what Atreides had done to Abulurd Harkonnen.

  In his mind, Griffin envisioned how their encounter might play out. After so many years of lying low, why should Atreides expect to hear from descendants of the young bashar whose career he had ruined long ago, whose name he had soiled? The surprise would be complete, and the deed needed to be done so that the man knew exactly who had defeated him. A Harkonnen must make him understand how much pain the whole family had suffered because of him—and then kill him in fair combat.

  Growing up together, Griffin and Valya had sparred, building each other up, testing, fighting. They had been perfectly matched, almost as if telepathically linked. They developed their own fighting techniques, honed their reflexes, learned how to respond to the slightest flicker of movement. No hesitation. They could spar on balanced, mist-slick logs, or they could jump, kick, and land again with perfect poise on narrow, wobbly canoes out in the harbor.

  Now Griffin wondered if Valya had been planning for an encounter like this all along. If he had to fight Vorian Atreides, his abilities could completely surprise his foe.

  His sister considered the two of them to be the only real Harkonnens true to their bloodline. In between practice matches, they studied the history of their ancestors Abulurd, Xavier … Quentin Butler, Faykan Butler, the great heroes of the Jihad. “We are of the Imperial line,” she had told him. “We should be on Salusa Secundus … not forgotten, as we are on Lankiveil. We were meant for much greater things.”

  Assassination, to avenge the family honor.

  Reaching the sheltered valley where Vorian Atreides and his family made their homes, Griffin arrived in the midst of a somber procession—not a celebration of Vorian’s bravery and skill, but a funeral. The village houses were adorned with black crepe, and the people who walked through the streets were in mourning. The few hundred gathered there might have been the valley’s entire population.

  Griffin had hoped to make a few discreet inquiries so he could learn where the man lived; anyone could see that his questions were coming from an offworlder. But they would not recognize him. It had been eight decades since Vorian had seen a living Harkonnen, and Griffin was three generations removed from Abulurd.

  He tried to slip unobtrusively into the funeral procession, feeling awkward. Maybe he could whisper a question or two. A middle-aged woman with red-rimmed eyes came up to him. “Our businesses are closed for today, sir. At times like these, the community draws together.”

  “Who is the deceased?”

  “Our mother has died. She was much loved. Mariella Atreides.” The woman shook her head. “I’m Bonda, her daughter.”

  Griffin covered his shock. “Atreides? Do you know Vorian Atreides, then? Is he your cousin?” He added quickly, before her questions could come to the fore, “Members of my family served with him a long time ago, during the Jihad.”

  Because of the sad ceremony, Bonda’s guard was down. She formed a wan smile, and seemed to think nothing of Griffin’s comment. “Vorian was my father, and he was well loved here. He did a great many good things for Kepler. We all miss him.” She shook her head. “There was a fire … the house burned down. We don’t know the exact cause.” Bonda looked up at him with tear-sparkled eyes. “My parents were married for close to fifty years. I suppose it’s no surprise that my mother didn’t last long after he was gone.”

  “Gone?” Alarm swirled through Griffin’s mind. “Vorian is … dead, then?” He didn’t know whether to feel flustered or relieved. If their nemesis was dead, then the Harkonnens no longer needed vengeance. Valya might not be entirely satisfied, but at least Griffin could go back home, work on solidifying the business of Lankiveil, and prepare to go to the Imperial capital as soon as his exam results and paperwork returned.…

  Bonda’s eyes widened briefly. “Oh, no, my father isn’t dead, wasn’t on Kepler when the awful fire occurred. After he came back from meeting with the Emperor on Salusa Secundus,
he left Kepler for good. Some sort of bargain he made with the throne in order to guarantee the safety of this planet.”

  Griffin was trembling. “Do you have any idea where he’s gone? I’ve traveled this far just to see him, just to … bring him something from my family.”

  “That shows dedication! Kepler isn’t an easy place to get to.” Bonda shook her head as the mourners gathered in the center of the town. “My father went off to find more adventures, I suppose. My mother insisted that he go without her, and I’m trying to accept that.”

  “Do you know the name of the planet?”

  “He made no secret of it. He went to a place he’s never been, the desert world of Arrakis. I’m afraid he won’t ever come back.”

  “Arrakis? Why would he go there?”

  The woman shrugged. “Who can say? My father has lived so long, maybe he’s been everywhere else that interests him. Will you stay for the funeral, as our guest? Tell us what you know of him, any stories? I’m sure we’ll all be happy to hear it.”

  Griffin swallowed hard. They would not like the only stories he knew about Vorian Atreides.

  Though he felt reluctant to remain here where he so obviously didn’t belong, he knew from the transport schedules that it would be days before another outbound ship came to Kepler. “I’ll stay for the funeral,” he said. “I’d like to hear more about your father, but my own tales of Vorian Atreides must remain private.”

  “As you wish,” Bonda said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a eulogy to deliver.”

  Griffin could not think of anything else to say, and did not want to speak any more lies, so he waited, as quiet and unassuming as possible, while observing the celebration of the life of Mariella Atreides.

  The galaxy is filled with countless wonders—beautiful worlds and harsh ones. No person could visit them all in a single lifetime, not even me, with all the years I have been alotted.

  —VORIAN ATREIDES, PRIVATE JOURNALS, KEPLER PERIOD

  The spice workers were glad to receive Vor among them. The rugged men had open minds and an accepting attitude toward an offworlder who found himself with no better options than to work out in the deep desert. But they had a hard and impatient discipline. Irresponsibility was not tolerated in the desert, because the simplest mistake could cost many lives.

  New recruits had to learn quickly, and in the midst of that physically demanding challenge, Vor greatly missed Mariella and all his family and friends on Kepler.

  The gruff, leathery-faced crew chief named Calbir took Vorian under his wing, treating him as an inexperienced young man, even though Vor was much, much older than he was. He didn’t seem to know Vor’s surname, though Vor had held onto his identity, placing his full name on the hiring documentation for Combined Mercantiles. He did not tell his comrades here anything about who he really was, and no one at this level seemed to have made any connection with his name at all. They just knew him as “Vor,” and his first name generated no interest.

  Noticing that the new hire wore a shield belt, Calbir scowled. “That identifies you as an offworlder, boy. I know why you wear that—for personal protection in Arrakis City—but don’t activate it out here, or it will be the end of us. Holtzman fields attract the great worms. Just to play it safe, let me put it in your locker until we get back to base.” Vor removed the belt and handed it over.

  Given his many years of experience flying aircraft and spacecraft, Vor suggested he would be a good candidate to pilot one of the single-man scout skimcrafts over the desert wastelands, keeping on the alert for any telltale sign of melange-stained sands, but Calbir had scoffed at the offer. “Years of experience?” He ran his eyes up and down the young-looking man who stood before him. “The winds of Arrakis are harsh and unexpected. You have to demonstrate real mastery before I’m going to trust you with a skimcraft. I don’t care where you’re from or where else you’ve flown, you’re not ready for this place—trust me when I say that.”

  Vor knew the old crew chief was wrong, but in order to convince him otherwise, he would have to reveal more about himself than he wanted to. Instead, he went to work with the others in the gigantic spice-excavator, a roving machine the size of a large building. Like an artificial grazing beast, it chewed trenches across spice-enriched sands. On big treads the excavator could make surprisingly good time across the dunes, racing from one sheltered rock outcrop to another while aircraft kept watch for an approaching sandworm. Hopscotching across the desert, the excavator gathered large amounts of melange and tried to outrun the monstrous creatures that roved the spice sands.

  The collectors spilled debris from one centrifuge to the next to the next, like the successive stomachs in an ungulate, except in this instance they were separating out the sand particles. All that remained was the rich soft powder that smelled like cinnamon but was an extremely potent drug.

  Early in Vor’s life, melange had been an interesting commodity, a rare substance distributed to nobles by the merchant Aurelius Venport. During the Omnius-induced plagues, however, spice had proved to be an effective palliative, boosting immune systems and helping many people recover. That discovery, and humanity’s desperation, had sparked a boom of melange harvesting on the harsh desert planet, where few civilized people had previously wanted to go. During the spice rush, hordes of ambitious fortune-hunters (both optimists and charlatans) journeyed across space to Arrakis. Many died in the rush, and a few got rich. The influx of offworlders forever changed the lives of the reclusive denizens, expanding small company towns like Arrakis City into bustling commercial hubs.

  As an unforeseen consequence of the measures to fight the plagues, much of the Imperium was now addicted to spice, although Vor couldn’t recall having seen users on Kepler. The interplanetary markets demanded increased production. During the epidemics, all competitors were tolerated in order to help meet the needs of sick populations. Now, however, the powerful Combined Mercantiles, part of the Venport commercial empire, was ruthless about driving out all competition and quashing rivals one by one, through bribery, blackmail, sabotage, or more extreme means. Many rival settlements were now just ghost towns in the desert rocks.

  Calbir and his spice crew, including Vorian, worked for Combined Mercantiles. When Vor had arrived in Arrakis City and asked for work on a deep-desert crew, he was repeatedly warned to steer clear of anything but a Venport operation if he valued his life. “Then again,” said one desiccated and sad-looking woman who sold him supplies, “if you valued your life, you wouldn’t be going out there in the first place.”

  He had brushed her aside with a laugh. “I’ve had enough comforts in my life. The open dunes call to me. There are people far out in the desert that I’d like to meet.”

  “If you say so. But don’t be so sure that they want to meet you.”

  By now, Vor had spent several weeks on the spice crew. It was hot and dusty work, but he didn’t mind. He found it rejuvenating, for he could let his mind relax into a blank state and go about his duties with no thought for the future except what lay at the end of the next long and exhausting shift. The work itself was exciting: How could a job ever become tedious when at any moment a leviathan could burrow up from beneath the sands and devour everything?

  During its daily work, the excavator scuttled across the open sands, hurrying to the next rock outcrop. From the moment a scout skimcraft spotted a spice deposit, to the moment the framework haulers dropped harvesting machinery onto the open dunes, Vor and his team worked in a race against time. The giant machinery heaved itself across the sand, scraping up as much rust-colored melange as possible. As a last resort, if they should ever find themselves too far from safety and unable to outrun an oncoming worm, the crew could eject in an escape pod, and cargo containers of melange would launch into the sky, guided by sluggish jets to the nearest safety zone, where Combined Mercantiles could retrieve and salvage the people and spice.

  So far, that hadn’t happened. A miscalculation by even a minute would doom them. Vor
did not want to end his life in the midst of of wreckage slowly digested in a worm’s gullet.

  Rather than returning to Arrakis City each day, which was hundreds—sometimes thousands—of kilometers away, the excavator spent the nights on lonely rock outcroppings, hard islands safe from the sandworms. Now, as the stars shone forth out of the impenetrable blackness of an empty desert night, Vor walked restlessly around on the rocks, thinking of Kepler, of Mariella, wondering how many years he’d have to wait before he could risk slipping back there, just to see them again. And if Mariella would still be there.

  As he wandered, alone, Vor was intrigued to find evidence of an old shelter made out of stacked boulders. He called Calbir over. “Looks like we aren’t the first ones to camp here. Another excavating crew?”

  The grizzled crew chief made an expression of distaste. “Desert people. Zensunnis, probably—descendants of escaped slaves. They came to Arrakis because they thought no sane person would want to settle this place. During the spice rush, they packed up and retreated into the most isolated wilderness, just to get away from people. I hear they still call themselves the Freemen, but scraping out a living here, with no sign of civilization, is hardly being free.”

  “Have you ever met one?” Vor asked. “I … I’d like to talk to them.”

  “Now why would you want to do that? Get those dreams out of your head! You’ll probably see a desert man if you work around here long enough, but we don’t have much to do with them.”

  The weary spice crew bedded down in the open, glad to be out of the stifling confinement of the dusty machinery. Calbir posted a watch, though the men grumbled that it seemed a ridiculous and paranoid precaution, until he showed them the signs of the old desert camp. “I’d rather you lost a little sleep than we all lost our lives. And if you’re not worried about a few nomads, just keep in mind that Josef Venport has made a lot of enemies, too.”