Road to Dune (56 page)

The rain let up, and Corysta wiped moisture from her face. Despite the punishment and exile the Bene Gesserit had imposed, she remained loyal to the Sisterhood. She would kill herself before revealing the location of Chapterhouse.

Finally Skira and the other Honored Matres returned to the comfort and warmth of their administrative buildings. With a swirl of patterned capes over damp leotards, the whores left Corysta and her companions to make their way back through the rain to their squalid daily lives, supporting their wounded Sisters.

Hurrying along a cliffside trail that led to her hut after she had left the others, Corysta watched the surf crashing against rocks below and wondered if the phibians were looking up at her through the stippled surface of waves. Did the amphibious creatures even think about the child they had marked and then abandoned to the sea? They must assume it to be dead.

Glad to have survived another interrogation, she ran home and slipped into her primitive dwelling where the baby waited, now healthier and stronger.

CORYSTA KNEW SHE could not keep the phibian child forever.

Her moments of happiness were often ephemeral, like fleeting flashes of light in the gloom of a dark chamber. She had learned to accept the precious moments for what they were—just moments.

Though she wanted to clutch the sea child to her breast and keep it safe, she knew that was not possible. Corysta wasn’t safe herself—how could she hope to keep a child safe? She could only protect the baby temporarily, giving him shelter until he grew strong enough to go off on his own. She would have to release him back into the sea. From the phibian child’s rapid rate of growth, she felt certain that he would become self-sufficient faster than a human could.

One evening, Corysta did something she’d been dreading. As darkness set in, she made her way down to her hidden cove along the familiar path, taking the child with her. Though she could not always see the way in the gloom, she was surprised at how surefooted she was.

Wading out into the cold water, she cradled the child securely in her arms, and heard him whimper as the water touched his legs and lower body. She’d hidden and cared for her sea child for almost two months now, and already he was the size of a human toddler. His blotchy, prominent birthmark bothered her not at all, but she knew his own people had cast him out because of it. The terrifying prospect of this evening had been on her mind for weeks, and she’d feared that the phibian would just swim away and never look back at her. Corysta knew his connection with the ocean was inevitable.

“I’m here,” she said in a gentle voice. “Do not be afraid.”

With its webbed hands, the child clung to her arms, refusing to let go. The rapidly humming pulse of his skin against hers revealed the baby’s silent terror.

Corysta waded back to the shallows, where the water was only a few inches deep, and sat there on the sand, letting the waves wash over her legs and the baby’s. The water was warmer than the cool evening air, and felt good as it touched her. Out to sea, the water glowed faintly phosphorescent, so that the bullet-shaped head was profiled against the horizon. The darkness of the small shape reminded her of the mysteries contained within him, and in the ocean beyond … .

Each evening thereafter, Corysta developed a routine. As darkness set in, she would go to her hidden cove and dip into the water, taking the tiny phibian along. Soon the creature she called Sea Child was walking alongside her and swimming in shallow water on his own.

Corysta wished she could be a phibian herself and swim out there, to the farthest reaches of this ocean world, escaping the brutal Honored Matres and taking her sea child with her. She wondered what it would be like to dive deep into the ocean, even if she did so on an unseen tether. At least there she might experience a familial bond that was stronger than anything she felt toward her Bene Gesserit Sisters.

CORYSTA PRODDED SEA CHILD to speak, but the phibian succeeded only in making primitive and unformed sounds from an undeveloped larynx.

“I’m sorry I can’t teach you properly,” she said, looking down at the toddler as he played on the stone floor of her hut, moving on his webbed hands and feet. She was about to prepare breakfast, combining crustaceans with native herbs she had collected from between the rocks.

The child looked at her without apparent comprehension. He was surrounded by crude toys she had made for him, shells and woody kelp knobs on which she had marked smiling faces. Some of the faces were human, while others she’d made to look like Sea Child’s own people. Curiously, he showed more interest in the ones that least resembled him.

The toddler stared into the carved human face on the largest piece of wood, picking it up with clumsy fingers. Then he looked up in sudden alarm, toward the door of the hut, peeling back his thick lips to expose tiny sharp teeth.

Corysta became aware of sounds outside and felt a bitter, sinking sensation. She barely had time to gather up the child and hold him against her before the door burst open in a hail of splinters.

Matre Skira loomed in the doorway. “What sort of witchery is this?”

“Stay away from us! Please.”

Sinewy women in tight leotards and black capes surrounded her. One of them tore the phibian child from her grasp; another beat her to the floor in a flurry of fists and sharp kicks. At first Corysta tried to fight back, but her efforts were hopeless, and she covered her face. The blows still got through. One broke her nose, and another shattered her arm. She cried out in pain, knowing that was what the whores wanted, but her physical discomfort didn’t compare with the terrible anguish she felt over losing the child.
Another
child.

Sea Child was hidden from her view, but she heard the baby phibian make his own terrible sounds, high-pitched squeals that chilled her to the bone. Were the Honored Matres hurting him? Anger surged through her, but she could not fight back against their numbers.

These whores from the Scattering—were they offshoots of the Bene Gesserit, descendants of Reverend Mothers who had fled into space centuries ago? They returned to the old Imperium like evil doppelgängers. And now, despite the dramatic differences between Honored Matres and Bene Gesserit, both groups had taken a child from Corysta.

She screamed in frustration and rage. “Don’t hurt him! Please. I’ll do anything, just let me keep him.”

“How touching.” Matre Skira rounded on her, feral eyes narrowing. “But do you mean it? You’ll do anything? Very well, tell us the location of Chapterhouse, and we will let you keep the brat.”

Corysta froze, and nausea welled up inside her. “I can’t.”

Sea Child let out a very human-sounding cry.

The Honored Matres scowled viciously. “Choose—Chapterhouse, or the child.”

She couldn’t! Or could she? She’d been trained as a Bene Gesserit, sworn her loyalty to the Sisterhood … which had, in turn, punished her for a simple human emotion. They had exiled her here because she dared to feel love for a child, for her own child.

Sea Child was not like her, but he did not care about Corysta’s shame, nor did she care about a patch of discoloration on his skin. He had clung to her, the only mother he had ever known.

But she was a Bene Gesserit. The Sisterhood ran through every cell of her body, through a succession of Other Lives descending through the endless chain of ancestors whom she had discovered upon becoming a Reverend Mother. Once a Bene Gesserit, always a Bene Gesserit … even after what the Sisterhood had done to her. They had already taught her what to do with her emotions.

“I can’t,” she said again.

Skira sneered. “I knew you were too weak.” She delivered a kick to the side of Corysta’s head.

A black wave of darkness approached, but Corysta used her Bene Gesserit bodily control to maintain her consciousness. Abruptly, she was jerked to her feet and dragged down to the cove, where the women threw her onto the spray-slick rocks.

Struggling to her knees, Corysta fought the pain of her injuries. To her horror she saw Skira wade into shallow water with Sea Child. The little phibian struggled against her and kept looking toward Corysta, crying out eerily for mother.

Her own baby had not known her so well, snatched from her arms only hours after birth. Corysta had never gotten to know her own little daughter, never learned how her life had been, what she had accomplished. Corysta had known this poor, inhuman baby much more closely. She had been a real mother, for just a little while.

Restrained by two strong women, Corysta saw froth in the sea just offshore, and presently she made out hundreds of swimming shapes in the water.
Phibians
. Half a dozen adults emerged from the ocean and approached Matre Skira, dripping water from their unclothed bodies.

Sea Child cried out again, and reached back toward Corysta, but Skira held his arms and blocked his view with her own body.

Corysta watched helplessly as the adult phibians studied the mark of rejection on the struggling child’s forehead. Would they just kill him now? Trying to remain strong, Corysta wailed when the phibians took her child with them and swam out to sea.

Would they try to kill him again, cast him out like a tainted chick from a nest, pecked to death and cast out? Corysta already longed to see him—if the phibians were going to kill him, and if the whores were going to murder her, she wanted at least to cling to him. Her Sea Child!

Instead, she saw a remarkable thing. The phibians who had originally rejected the child, who had made their bloody mark on the baby’s forehead, were now clearly helping him to swim. Supporting him, taking him with them. They did not reject him!

Her vision hampered by tears, she saw the phibians disappear beneath the waves. “Good-bye, my darling,” she said, with a final wave. She wondered if she would ever see him again … or if the whores would just break her neck with a swift blow now, leaving her body on the shore.

Matre Skira made a gesture, and the other Honored Matres released their hold, letting Corysta drop to the ground. The evil women looked at one another, thoroughly amused by her misery. They turned about and left her there.

She and Sea Child were still prisoners of the Honored Matres, but at least she had made the phibian stronger, and his people would raise him. He would prove the phibians wrong for ever marking him.

She had given him life after all, the true maternal gift. With a mother’s love, Corysta hoped her little one would thrive in deep and uncertain waters.

FOR BEVERLY HERBERT

There is no more moving tribute in all of literature than the three pages Frank Herbert wrote about Beverly Herbert in
Chapterhouse: Dune
, a novel that he completed at her side in Hawaii, while she was dying. Concerning his loving wife and best friend during more than thirty-seven years of marriage, he said, “Is it any wonder that I look back on our years together with a happiness transcending anything words can describe? Is it any wonder I do not want or need to forget one moment of it? Most others merely touched her life at the periphery. I shared it in the most intimate ways and everything she did strengthened me. It would not have been possible for me to do what necessity demanded of me during the final ten years of her life, strengthening her in return, had she not given of herself in the preceding years, holding back nothing. I consider that to be my great good fortune and most miraculous privilege.”

His earlier dedication in
Children of Dune
spoke of other dimensions of this remarkable woman:

FOR BEV:

Out of the wonderful commitment of our love and to share her beauty and her wisdom, for she truly inspired this book.

Frank Herbert modeled Lady Jessica Atreides after Beverly Herbert, as well as many aspects of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. Beverly was his writing companion and his intellectual equal. She was Frank Herbert’s universe, his inspiration, and—more than anyone else—his spiritual guide on the Road to Dune.

COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgments are made for use of the following material:

“Dune: A Whisper of Caladan Seas” © 1999 by Herbert Limited Partnership, first published in
Amazing Stories,
Summer 1999.

“Dune: Hunting Harkonnens” © 2002 by Herbert Limited Partnership.

“Dune: Whipping Mek” © 2003 by Herbert Limited Partnership.

“Dune: The Faces of a Martyr” © 2004 by Herbert Properties, LLC.

“Sea Child: A Tale of Dune” © 2006 by Herbert Properties, LLC., first published in
Elemental
:
The Tsunami Relief Anthology
(Tor Books 2006).

Excerpts of letters from Lurton Blassingame, Harlan Ellison, Sterling Lanier, Damon Knight, and Chilton Books reprinted with permission.

Excerpts of letters from John W. Campell, Jr., reprinted with permission of AC Projects, Inc., 7376 Walker Road, Fairview, TN 37062.

THE DUNE SERIES

BY FRANK HERBERT

Dune
Dune Messiah
Children of Dune
God Emperor of Dune
Heretics of Dune
Chapterhouse: Dune

BY FRANK HERBERT, BRIAN HERBERT, AND KEVIN J. ANDERSON

The Road to Dune
(includes original short novel
Spice Planet
)

BY BRIAN HERBERT AND KEVIN J. ANDERSON

Dune: House Atreides
Dune: House Harkonnen
Dune: House Corrino

Dune: The Butlerian Jihad
Dune: The Machine Crusade
Dune: The Battle of Corrin

Hunters of Dune
Sandworms of Dune (forthcoming)
Paul of Dune (forthcoming)

BY BRIAN HERBERT

Dreamer of Dune
(biography of Frank Herbert)

“This collection of essays, stories, and selections from Herbert’s papers will certainly be high-priority reading for
Dune
fans … . Of particular interest are the communications between [Frank] Herbert, John Campbell, and others during and after the release of
Dune
, and unpublished sequences from
Dune
and
Dune Messiah
… .
Dune
was a social and publishing phenomenon; it moved science fiction into general publishing (and marketing) awareness and spurred a wide public awareness of ecological balance. This account of its genesis should interest not only fans but also students of popular culture.”