Sisterhood of Dune (17 page)

Because Lankiveil felt so isolated, he was always happy for news dispatches from the Imperium. He longed for, but didn’t expect, a letter or holorecording from his sister; she was rarely allowed to write. A quick sorting of the packages led to disappointment—nothing from her, and no approval document that named him Lankiveil’s planetary Landsraad representative. Nor did he find a dispatch from his uncle Weller with an update of his progress from planet to planet, making new trade agreements for whale fur.

With growing displeasure, he saw that the stack contained only government reports, a few commercial inquiries, and an official-looking document from the offices of Celestial Transport. Coming into the room to say hello, his father glanced through the correspondence, saw nothing that interested him, and went off to consult the chef about dinner.

Griffin worked his way through the pile. Then, when he opened the CT dispatch, he felt a chill like a wash of icy spray curling up over the bow of a fishing boat. The letter began with five words that had signified catastrophic news throughout history. “We regret to inform you…”

The commercial spacefolding vessel bearing the passenger Weller Harkonnen, along with the entire cargo of whale fur from Lankiveil, had been lost en route to Parmentier. Due to a navigational hazard, all goods and passengers had vanished somewhere in deep space. They were considered unrecoverable.

The letter went on. “Space travel over such vast distances and poorly charted routes has always been a risky venture, and accidents inevitably happen. Celestial Transport is attempting to work through this difficulty, and we appreciate your patience in the matter. Please allow us to express our sincerest personal sympathies.”

The letter bore the replicated signature of Arjen Gates, head of the company. Griffin knew there must be over a thousand similar letters to the next-of-kin of the other passengers. An attachment referenced a waiver and disclaimer statement on the original shipping documents that Griffin had signed when engaging the transport.

Weller was gone, and the cargo with him. At first, Griffin thought more about the loss of his beloved uncle, then, as he read the dispatch again, he also began to grasp the severity of the blow to the Harkonnen treasury. There would be very little compensation, only a minimal payment that was described in the fine print of the bill of lading. Griffin had invested much of their family wealth into the whale-fur business venture, and House Harkonnen would be decades recovering from this. His carefully orchestrated plan to expand Harkonnen commercial influence had just collapsed into the vacuum of uncharted space.

As if in a dream, Griffin heard his father cheerfully whistling in the kitchen. Vergyl and the family chef had such good rapport. The young man sat stunned and silent for a long time, unwilling to destroy his father’s happiness. He would wait until the following day before telling anyone.

When Valya learned the news, she would no doubt find some way to trace the blame back to Vorian Atreides. Griffin, though, began to wonder if the Harkonnen family was cursed.

A storm in the desert leaves many scars and erases many others.

—a saying of the Freemen of Arrakis

After she had extracted all the information the black-market pilot could give, Ishanti spent two weeks quietly investigating the desert activities. Soon she found the illicit spice-harvesting operations.

The chief of the poachers, Dol Orianto, had made boastful comments in Arrakis City bars. He seemed to think there was nothing to be worried about. “This planet is big enough for competition—there were plenty of independent melange operations during the spice rush. Venport doesn’t own the whole world!” Orianto had laughed, and his workers chuckled with him.

The small industrial outpost in the mountains above Carthag was obvious and undefended, and the VenHold teams moved in. The attack was over quickly, and Ishanti and her forty attack skimcraft flew away from the industrial outpost, leaving the smoking ruins of habitation buildings behind and charred bodies strewn on the rocks. The spice-storage silos remained intact—Directeur Venport had been adamant that the contraband melange was much too valuable to be discarded in a fit of pique.

At first, Ishanti considered letting one or two of the poachers live so they could send a grim report to Arjen Gates and Celestial Transport. Instead, she recorded images of the attack, deciding that a simple message pack would do the job. That way they could control the message.

Now, inside the noisy passenger compartment of the skimcraft, Ishanti shouted to her companions—many of them female Freemen warriors—above the thrum of articulated wings. “Once we finish here, we’ll salvage the equipment and retrieve the spice as a special gift.” Secretly, she would also send an immediate message to Naib Sharnak out in the deep desert settlement, informing her people that if they moved quickly they could take away all the bodies to reclaim the water before anyone knew the difference.

Ishanti had been careful to capture Dol Orianto alive, so that the appalled man could watch the slaughter of his crew. Tied up and tossed on the deck like a piece of discarded cargo, Orianto squirmed and struggled, but every time he thrashed, the shigawire bindings contracted around his wrists, legs, and throat, drawing lines of blood in the flesh.

“There is nothing you can say to save yourself,” Ishanti said in a cool voice, squatting next to him. “Think carefully now on the only decision you have left, your most important decision: How will you die—bravely, or as a coward?”

He didn’t answer. Tears were pouring out of his eyes … a waste of water, she thought, but his whole body was a waste of water. Still, some messages were necessary and, in the larger scheme of things, more important than a few liters of water.

She had already given the pilot her course, and the skimcraft flew high above the gathering dust clouds. Ishanti had studied weathersat readings to find the nearest Coriolis storm. It was less than an hour away.

When Dol Orianto did not answer her question, she sat back and rode in silence. The chief poacher whimpered but did not beg for his life; she gave him credit for that.

The pilot, an expert on Arrakis weather patterns, guided them over a whirlpool of clouds and dust. From the sealed, scratched ports, the passengers could look down into a frightening maw. The vortex of howling winds struck fear into all desert people. Viewing the gigantic storm now from above, even at a safe altitude, Ishanti found it awe-inspiring, intimidating, and beautiful in a way.

But not beautiful for Dol Orianto.

When they were directly above the sand hurricane, the pilot circled and signaled from the cockpit. Ishanti stood up from her hard metal bench, grabbed the poacher by his shoulders and dragged him to his feet. He was trembling.

“Some things have to be done,” she said, by way of apology. Josef Venport had made his wishes very clear. “Others would call this a glorious death.”

She and her companions clipped their harnesses to the interior wall so they would not be sucked out when the hatch opened. Orianto squirmed harder, tried to get away; the tightening shigawire sliced through his wrists, and his veins gushed blood.

Ishanti closed her eyes, uttered a quick prayer, and heaved him out through the hatch.

The man tumbled headfirst into the sky, toward the yawning mouth of the Coriolis storm. He dwindled to a tiny speck long before the vortex swallowed him up. Yes, some would call that a glorious death.

She closed the skimcraft hatch and signaled to the pilot. “We have all the images we need. Now back to Arrakis City—I have a report to make.”

Practice can take a student only so far. To truly advance, he must experience the real thing.

—
GILBERTUS ALBANS
, Mentat manual

The elite Mentat School accepted only the most gifted candidates, and in the decades that Gilbertus Albans had run the facility, a number of his students had excelled in the rigorous programs, advancing faster than their peers. Their minds were efficient and organized, advanced, sharp … true human computers.

Erasmus was very proud to see his influence.

Currently, the school’s best student, arguably the best ever, was Draigo Roget. Draigo surpassed even most of the Mentat instructors in his skills—a fact that did not escape the young man himself, who at times displayed too much ego. Just five years ago, Draigo had arrived on Lampadas, passed the qualification tests and entry examination, and paid for his considerable tuition with a gift from an unnamed benefactor.

Gilbertus had never met anyone quite so brilliant, and now Draigo was nearly finished with everything the Mentat School could teach him. He would graduate with the next group in a month, and Gilbertus had asked him to consider remaining on Lampadas as an instructor, but Draigo was noncommittal.

This morning they met in an oval war-game chamber; the room was large enough to accommodate hundreds of students, but now it contained only the two of them. Windows around the perimeter of the room showed part of the blue-walled administration building and glimpses of the greenish waters of the marsh lake, sparkling in sunlight.

The pair of Mentats, though, were intent on far-off, imaginary space battles.

They sat in tall chairs and engaged in a competition, each controlling a holographic war fleet through a tactical obstacle course of asteroids, gravity wells, foldspace mishaps, uncertain targets. Their minds intent, Gilbertus and Draigo conducted a skirmish, throwing simulated war fleets against each other, prosecuting an imaginary war at the speed of thought.

Barely moving in their chairs, they made finger movements that were interpreted by motion sensors and transmitted into the mechanism. Gilbertus would never demonstrate the system to Manford Torondo even though, technically, this was not forbidden technology, because it could not function without human guidance.

Simulated space battles flurried in the air between them, ship movements so swift that the images were blurred. The war vessels were like game pieces, tangled inside a crowded solar system. The complex engagements took place among moons or gas giants, close to inhabited planets, or out in the distant cometary cloud. Color codes distinguished the sides, red against yellow, battles within battles.

Over the course of an hour, speaking hardly a word, Gilbertus and Draigo had already fought eleven battles, and now the tempo increased. Other than in his intense exercises with Erasmus, the Mentat teacher had never faced such a challenge. He still held a substantial advantage over Draigo, but his student was catching up.

On the compressed timescale of the simulation, entire solar systems could be lost in seconds. Each Mentat could envision battle plans, unfolding how every second-, third-, and fourth-order consequence would play out in their minds. Gilbertus had taught such techniques, but few of his students grasped the broad field of view of Gestalt philosophy—a restructuring of perception to encompass the whole, instead of its individual parts.

Drops of perspiration formed on Gilbertus’s forehead.

Unseen, the memory core of Erasmus watched the proceedings via concealed sensors. The restless robot’s gelcircuitry core needed a small measure of freedom. Gilbertus planned to construct a physical form so that the independent robot could become mobile again. Someday. With his exceptionally high intellect, Erasmus required constant stimulation. The robot core had offered to help him in the war-game simulations against Draigo, but Gilbertus refused to cross that moral line. “Cheating,” he had called it.

“Improving your odds,” Erasmus countered. “Increasing your advantage.”

“No. You will watch—that’s all.”

As he witnessed the rapid progress of his star pupil playing the game with him, however, Gilbertus began to have second thoughts.…

While the men remained intent on their simulation, sitting across from each other, Gilbertus spoke to his pupil, “You continue to improve, but never forget that there are always unforeseen elements in battle. Seemingly small and insignificant factors, but possibly of great importance—things you cannot plan for. Be alert, assess each situation rapidly, and take appropriate action.”

“You are trying to distract me, sir.” Draigo’s black eyebrows knitted together in concentration, and his dark gaze studied the simulated space conflict.

Loud conversation interrupted the competitors as students pulled open the chamber doors and entered for their scheduled class. Startled by the disruption, Draigo twitched, scattering his projected fleet around the virtual battlefield. Gilbertus could have seized the opportunity to secure a victory then, but he froze the game instead.

“Unforeseen elements such as that, for example,” he said.

Draigo recovered. “I understand. Shall we finish?”

“Very well. A Mentat must learn to concentrate under all circumstances.”

Gilbertus resumed the simulation as Mentat students gathered around to observe the show, but his conscience urged him to end this private battle and give the other trainees the attention they deserved. In the thick of the battle, Gilbertus intentionally slacked off and waited for his opponent to move in for the kill.

Noticing his instructor’s change of mind-set, however, Draigo sat back in his tall chair with a disgusted look. He let his own forces collapse and get hit by Gilbertus’s hamstrung force. With a sigh, the young man disengaged himself from the war-game controls. “I don’t want to win that way.”

Gilbertus stood and stretched. “Soon you won’t have to.”

The young man had won nearly forty percent of the engagements.

From a tiny seed can grow a mighty tree, able to withstand the most severe of storms. Remember, Rayna Butler was just a sickly, fever-struck girl when she began her crusade—and look what has grown from it! I am but another tree in the forest of steadfast belief that Rayna planted. My followers will not bend to the whims of nonbelievers who fight against us.

—
MANFORD TORONDO
,
The Only Path