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The withered Honored Matre Ingva often talked with Uxtal about melange, as if she didn't think--or care--that the Waffs could hear her. She demanded to know when the children would reveal their secrets.
Waff wasn't aware that he had any secrets. He didn't remember any.
"They mirror and mimic each other," Uxtal said to Ingva. "I have heard them speak simultaneously and make the same noises, the same motions. The other ghola groups are growing even faster, it seems."
"When can we get started?" Ingva hovered close to him, making the little researcher squirm. "I am not reluctant to threaten you--or tempt you--with a sexual experience beyond your most incredible fantasies."
Uxtal seemed to shrink into himself and answered in a voice that cracked with fear. "Yes, those eight are as ready as they are ever going to be. No sense in waiting any longer."
"They are expendable," said Ingva.
"Not exactly expendable. The next batch is six months younger, and the others are even more recently removed from the tanks. Twenty-four in all, of varying ages. Even so, if we are forced to kill all eight of these, there will be others soon. We can try again and again and again." He swallowed hard. "We have to expect a certain number of mistakes."
"No, we don't." Ingva released the force field and licked her lips. She and Uxtal entered the protected chamber while the lab assistants stood guard outside. The eight gholas clumped together, backing away. Until now, they had not known that numerous other Waff gholas were being raised elsewhere in the large laboratory building.
Uxtal gave the accelerated ghola children a forced smile of encouragement, which none of the Waffs believed. "Come with us. There's something we have to show you."
"And if we refuse?" demanded Waff Three.
Ingva chuckled. "Then we will drag you--unconscious, if necessary."
Uxtal wheedled, "You will learn why you are here, why we made you, and what you have that we need."
Waff One hesitated, looked at his identical brothers. It was a temptation they could not resist. Though they had received forced educational induction, given inexplicable background to lay a foundation for something, the gholas were hungry to understand.
"I will go," Waff One said, and he actually took Uxtal's hand, pretending to be a sweet child. The nervous researcher flinched at the touch, but led the way out of the protected chamber. Waffs Two through Eight followed.
They entered a confined laboratory where Uxtal paraded the gholas in front of a spectacle--several brain-dead Tleilaxu Masters hooked up to tubes and instruments. Drool curled down gray chins. Machines covered their genitalia, pumping, milking, filling translucent bottles. The victims all looked uncomfortably like Waff, only older.
Uxtal waited while the staring children absorbed what they saw. "You used to be that. All of you."
Waff One raised his pointed chin with some measure of pride. "We were Tleilaxu Masters?"
"And now you must remember what you were. Along with everything else."
"Line them up!" Ingva ordered. Uxtal handed the Waff roughly to an assistant and waited until all of the accelerated children stood in front of him.
Strutting back and forth in front of the identical copies like a caricature of a commander, Uxtal made explanations and demands. "The old Tleilaxu Masters knew how to manufacture melange using axlotl tanks. You have that secret. It is buried within you." He paused, clasped his small hands behind his back.
"We don't have our memories," one of the Waffs said.
"Then find them. If you remember, we will let you live."
"And if we don't?" Waff One asked defiantly.
"We have eight of you here, and others elsewhere. We need only one. The rest of you are completely disposable."
Ingva chuckled. "And if all eight of you fail us, then we will simply turn to the next eight and repeat the process. As many times as necessary."
Uxtal tried to look intimidating. "Now, which of you will reveal what we need to know?"
The matching gholas stood in the line; some fidgeted, some remained defiant. It was a standard ghola-awakening technique, to drive a person to psychological and physical crisis, forcing the buried chemical memories to overcome the barriers inside.
"I don't remember," the Waffs all said in perfect unison.
A commotion interrupted them, and Uxtal turned as Matre Superior Hellica, resplendent in a purple bodysuit and flowing veils and capes, strode into the chamber leading a small Guild delegation and a floating, hissing chamber that held a mutated Navigator. Edrik himself!
"We came to watch the completion of your task, little man. And to reach financially acceptable terms with the Navigators, should you succeed."
Surrounded by plumes of cinnamony-orange gas, Edrik approached a viewing window in his tank. The eight gholas felt the tension in the chamber increase.
Uxtal gathered enough courage to yell at the Waffs, though he seemed almost comical doing so. "Tell us how to make spice in the axlotl tanks! Speak, if you want to live."
The Waffs understood the threat and believed it, but they had no memories to reveal, no stored knowledge. Sweat blossomed on their small gray foreheads.
"You are Tleilaxu Master Tylwyth Waff. All of you. You are everything he was. Before he died on Rakis, he prepared replacement gholas of himself here on Tleilax. We used cells from those"--he jerked his head toward the miserable mindless men on their extraction tables--"to create the eight of you. You hold his memories stored in your minds."
"Obviously, they require more incentive," Matre Superior Hellica said, looking bored. "Ingva, kill one of them. I don't care which."
Like a murderous machine, the old Honored Matre had been waiting to be activated. She could have attacked with a traditional flurry of kicks and blows, but she had come prepared for something more colorful. She drew a long slaughtering knife she had confiscated from the neighboring slig farmer. With a sideways sweep of the monoblade and a quick flash of blood, Ingva decapitated Waff Four in the middle of the line.
As the head hit the floor, Waff One cried out in sympathetic pain, along with his surviving brothers. The head rolled to a stop at an odd angle, to stare with glazing eyes at the blood pooling out from the neck stump. The gholas all tried to run like panicked mice, but were brutally r
estrained by the assistants.
Uxtal turned greenish, as if he might either faint or vomit. "The memories are triggered through psychological crisis, Matre Superior! Simply butchering one of them is not sufficient. It must be prolonged, an extended anguish. A mental dilemma--"
Hellica nudged the bloody head with her toe. "The torture wasn't intended for this one, little man, but for the seven others. It's a basic rule: If one inflicts only pain, the subject can cling to hope that the torture will end, that he may somehow survive." A thin smile robbed the Matre Superior's face of all beauty. "Now, however, the others have not the slightest doubt that they will be killed if I say they are to be killed. No bluffing. That certainty of death should provide the correct trigger . . . or they will all die. Now, proceed!"
Ingva left the small body lying there.
"Seven of you remain," Uxtal said, reaching a crisis point of his own. "Which of you will remember first?"
"We don't know the information you request!" Waff Six shouted.
"That is unfortunate. Try harder."
As Hellica and the Navigator watched, Uxtal signaled Ingva. The woman took her time choosing, drawing out the tension, walking slowly up and down the ranks of the young gholas. The Waffs trembled and then shook, as she prowled behind them.
"I don't remember!" Waff Three wailed.
Ingva responded by thrusting the point of her bloody slaughtering knife into his back and out his chest, piercing his heart on the way through. "Then you are of no use to us."
Waff One felt a sharp pain strike his own heart, as if an echo of the blade had stabbed there, too. The clamor in his mind reached a crescendo. He no longer had any thought of defiance or of withholding information. He did not resist the memories or past lives inside him. He squeezed his eyes shut and screamed silently to himself, begging his body to divulge what it knew.
But nothing came to him.
Ingva lifted her long blade, jerking the Waff Three ghola into the air with it, his legs still kicking. Then she let him slide off the tip, and he thudded to the floor. Ingva stepped back, waiting to be called again. She was clearly enjoying this.
"You make this more difficult than it needs to be," Uxtal said. "The rest of you can stay alive--all you have to do is remember. Or does death mean nothing to a ghola?"
