AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Your prophecy also guaranteed a Kwisatz Haderach aboard the no-ship. I want both versions--redundancy to assure victory. And I do not want the humans to have one. I must control them both."
"We will find the no-ship. We already know there are many intriguing things aboard, including a Tleilaxu Master. He may be the only one left alive, and I would very much like to speak with him--as would you. The Master needs to see how all those Face Dancers have shaped us, built us, so that we could become closer to gods. Closer than humans, at any rate."
"We will keep sending out our net. And we will find that ship."
All around the city, in a dramatic statement of the evermind's impatience, towering buildings collapsed, full metal structures fell in upon themselves. Hearing the thundering sounds and feeling the floor shake beneath him, the independent robot was not impressed. Too many times he had witnessed such overblown theatrics. Omnius certainly enjoyed running the show, for better and often for worse, though Erasmus continually tried to control the evermind's excesses. The future depended on it--the future that Erasmus had ordained.
He dug through the projections that he'd digested from trillions of datapoints. All of his results were colored to fit precisely the prophecies he had formulated himself. Omnius believed them all. The gullible evermind relied too much on filtered information, and the robot played him well.
Given the proper parameters, Erasmus was absolutely certain the millennia ahead would turn out properly.
Those who see do not always understand. Those who claim to understand can be the blindest of all.
--the Oracle of Time
What remained of Norma Cenva's ancient corporeal form was confined inside a chamber that had been built and modified around her during thousands of years. But her mind knew no physical boundaries. She was only tenuously connected to flesh, a biological generator of pure thought. The Oracle of Time.
Her mental links to the fabric of the universe gave her the ability to travel anywhere along infinite possibilities. She could see the future and the past, but not always with perfect clarity. Her brain was such that she could touch the Infinite and almost--almost--comprehend it.
Her nemesis, the evermind, had laid down a vast electronic network throughout the fabric of space, a complex tachyon road map that most people could not see. Omnius used it as a net to sift for his prey, but so far he had not managed to snare the no-ship.
Long ago, Norma had created the precursor to the Guild as a means of fighting the thinking machines. Since that time, the Guild had taken on a life of its own, growing away from her while she stretched herself farther into the cosmos. Politics between planets, power struggles between the Navigator faction and the human Administrators, monopolies on valuable commodities such as soostones, Ixian technologies, or melange--such problems did not concern her.
Keeping watch over mankind required an investment of her mental currency. She felt the turmoil in civilization, knew the great schism in the Guild. She would have chastised the Administrators for creating such a crisis, if she could only remember how to speak to such small people. Norma found it exhausting to talk in simple enough terms to make herself comprehensible even to her advanced Navigators. She had to make them understand the true Enemy, so that they could shoulder the burden of fighting.
If the Oracle of Time did not attend to grander priorities, no one else would. No one else in the universe could possibly do it. With her prescience, she grasped what was most important: Find the lost no-ship. The final Kwisatz Haderach was aboard, and Kralizec's black cloud had already released its torrents. But Omnius was searching for the same thing and might get to it first.
She had felt the recent struggles between the Bene Gesserits and the Honored Matres. Before that she had witnessed the original Scattering and Famine Times, as well as the extended life and traumatic death of the God Emperor. But all of those events were little more than background noise.
Find the no-ship.
As she had always foreseen and feared, the unrelenting foe had come back. No matter what guise the thinking machines now wore, regardless of how much they had changed, the Enemy was still the Enemy.
And Kralizec is well under way.
While her prescience flowed outward and inward, ripples of time eddied around her, making accurate predictions difficult. She encountered a vortex, a random, powerful factor that could change the outcome in uncounted ways: a Kwisatz Haderach, a person as anomalous as Norma Cenva herself, a wildcard variable.
Omnius wanted to guide and control that special human. The evermind and his Face Dancers had sought the no-ship for years, but so far Duncan Idaho had eluded capture. Even the Oracle had been unable to find him again.
Norma had done her best to thwart the Enemy every step of the way. She had saved the no-ship, hoping to protect the people onboard, but she had lost contact afterward. Something on the ship was more effective than a no-field at blinding her search. She could only hope the thinking machines were as blind.
The Oracle's search continued, her thoughts reeling out in delicate probes. Alas, the vessel simply was not there. In some mysterious manner, the passengers hid it from her . . . assuming it had not been destroyed.
Though her prescience was not clear, Norma realized that time was growing shorter and shorter, for everyone. The crux point had to occur soon. Thus, she needed to gather her allies. The foolish Administrators had reconfigured many of their great ships, installing artificial controls--like thinking machines!--so that she could no longer call upon them through her paranormal means. But she could still command a thousand of her loyal Navigators. She would make them ready for battle, the final battle.
As soon as she found the no-ship. . . .
The Oracle of Time expanded her mind, casting her thoughts into the void like a fisherman, until the neural ache was incredible. She pushed harder than ever, stretching her boundaries beyond anything she had previously attempted. No price of pain could be too great. She knew full well the consequences of failure.
All around her, a vast clock ticked.
There must be a place where we can find a home, where we can be safe and rest. The Bene Gesserit sent out so many Sisters on their own Scattering before the Honored Matres came. Are they all lost, as well?
--SHEEANA,
confidential no-ship journals
Flying ever onward, the Ithaca reeled from the recent spate of damage. And the saboteur continued to elude them. What more can we do to track him down? Even Duncan's most thorough Mentat projections offered no new suggestions.
Miles Teg and Thufir Hawat once again dispatched teams to inspect, and even ransack, the quarters of all passengers, hoping to find incriminating evidence. The Rabbi and his people complained about purported violations of their privacy, but Sheeana demanded their full cooperation. To the extent possible, Teg had been closing down sections of the immense vessel with electronic barricades, but the clever saboteur was able to get through anyway.
Assuming no further incidents, with the life-support, airrecirculation, and food-growth systems crippled, the passengers could
not last more than a few months without stopping somewhere to replenish the stores. But it had been years since they had found another suitable world.
Duncan wondered: Is someone trying to destroy us . . . or drive us to a particular place?
With no starmaps or reliable guidance, he tried to use his uncanny prescience one more time. Another big gamble. Activating the Holtzman engines and closing his eyes, Duncan folded space again, spinning the cosmic roulette wheel--
And the no-ship emerged, intact but still lost, at the perimeter of a star system. A yellow sun with a necklace of worlds, including a terrestrial planet that orbited at the appropriate distance to support life. Possibly habitable, certainly with oxygen and water that the Ithaca could take aboard. A chance . . .
Others had gathered on the navigation bridge by the time the no-ship approached the uncharted world. Sheeana got down to business. "What do we have here? Breathable air? Food? A place to live?"
Gazing through the observation window, Duncan was pleased at what he saw. "The instruments say yes. I suggest we send a team immediately."
"Resupply is not good enough," Garimi said, her tone gruff. "It never was. We should consider remaining here, if this is the kind of world we've been looking for."
"We considered that at the planet of the Handlers, too," Sheeana said.
"If the saboteur drove us here, we need to be very cautious," Duncan said. "I know it was a random foldspace jump, but I'm still troubled. Our pursuers cast a wide net. I would not be quick to dismiss the possibility that this place is a trap."
"Or our salvation," Garimi suggested.
"We'll have to see for ourselves," Teg said. Working with the bridge controls, he displayed high-resolution images on the wide screens. "Plentiful oxygen and vegetation, especially at the higher latitudes away from the equator. Clear signs of habitation, small villages, midsized cities, mostly far to the north. Large-scale meteorological scans show that the climate is in upheaval." He pointed to storm patterns, swaths of dying forests and plains, large lakes and inland seas shriveling into dust bowls. "Very few clouds in the equatorial latitudes. Minimal atmospheric moisture."
