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With a disappointed sigh, he nodded again, and Ingva killed another one.
"Five left." He looked down at the unpleasant mess, then glanced apologetically to Hellica. "There is a possibility that none of these gholas is acceptable. The next batch will be ready soon, but perhaps we should prepare more axlotl tanks, just in case."
"We're trying!" one of the Waffs cried.
"You are also dying. Time is running out." Uxtal waited for a moment, until his anticipation turned to clear dismay. He was sweating, too; his entire career, such as it was, was hanging on the line.
Ingva killed another one. Half of the Waffs now lay dead on the floor.
Moments later she killed a fifth, stepping up behind him, grabbing his dark hair, and slitting his throat.
Frantic, the remaining three Waffs tore at their own hair and struck themselves in the chests and faces, as if physical blows could dislodge memories. Weaving back and forth with her long knife, Ingva slashed at them, making shallow and playful cuts in their gray skin. Despite their continued frantic protestations, she murdered a sixth ghola.
Only two remained.
Waff One and his last identical sibling--Waff Seven--could feel hidden thoughts and experiences boiling through the turmoil in their minds, like regurgitated food. Waff One watched the agony around him, saw the corpses of his brothers. The memories were locked away, but not by the veils of time; rather, he suspected the old Masters had implanted some sort of internal security system.
"Oh, just kill them all!" Hellica said. "We have wasted your time today, Navigator."
"Wait," Edrik said through a speaker in his tank. "Allow this to play out."
The tension and the panic in the two remaining gholas had reached a peak. By now the pressure of the crisis should have caused a critical meltdown.
Acting on her own, without looking at Uxtal or the Matre Superior, Ingva drew the slaughtering knife across the belly of Waff Seven and eviscerated him. Blood and entrails spilled out, and he doubled over, screaming, trying to hold his intestines inside. He took a long time dying, and his moans filled the room, with Uxtal's repeated demands for information as a counterpoint.
Now the Matre Superior herself strode forward, glaring at Uxtal. "This is a tedious failure, little man. You are worthless." She drew a small, stubby dagger from her waist. Moving up to Waff One, she pressed the point against his temple. "This is the thinnest point in your skull. I'd barely need to press at all to shove my blade into your brain. Maybe that will cut loose your memories?" The knife's tip drew a drop of dark blood. "You have ten seconds."
Waff was giddy with terror, and only distantly aware that both his bowels and his bladder had let loose. Hellica began counting down. Numbers like sledgehammers struck his mind. Numbers . . . formulae, calculations. Sacred mathematical combinations.
"Wait!"
The Matre Superior completed her countdown. The Navigator continued to observe. Uxtal himself trembled in terror, as if convinced she would kill him next.
Waff suddenly started babbling a steady stream of information that he had never learned from the forced-education systems. It flowed out of him like sewage from a burst pipe. Materials, procedures, random quotations from the secret catechism of the Great Belief. He described secret meetings with Honored Matres aboard a no-ship, about how the old Tleilaxu had meant to betray the Bene Gesserit, how he and his fellow Masters did not trust the oddly changed Lost Tleilaxu from the Scattering. Lost Tleilaxu such as Uxtal . . .
"Please withdraw your knife, Matre Superior," the Navigator said.
"He has not yet revealed what we need!" Ingva brandished her own blade, apparently anxious to murder the last ghola, as if she had not yet spilled enough blood for one day.
"He will." Uxtal looked at the terrified, miserable ghola. "This Waff has just been buried by the mudslide of his past life."
"Many lives!" In desperate self-defense, the reawakened Master spewed forth what he could. But his memory was imperfect, and he couldn't get it all. Whole segments of knowledge were corrupted--a side-effect of the forbidden acceleration process.
"Give him time to sort through it all," Uxtal said, sounding pathetically relieved. "Even with what he has said already, I can see the path to new methods that may yield melange." Hellica still pressed her short knife against Waff's head. "Matre Superior! He is too great a resource to waste at this time. We can coax more out of him."
"Or torture it out," Ingva suggested.
Uxtal grabbed the sweaty hand of the last ghola. "I require this one for my work. Otherwise, there will be delays." Without waiting for an answer, he yanked the weak-kneed Waff away from the macabre scene.
"Clean this up," Hellica demanded of Ingva, who in turn ordered the lab assistants to do it.
As Uxtal hurried away with his young charge, he lowered his voice to a threatening whisper. "I lied to save your life. Now give me the rest of the information."
The ghola nearly collapsed. "I remember nothing more. It is all still churning inside me, but I can sense great gaps. Something is wrong--"
Uxtal cuffed him. "You had better come up with something good anyway, or both of us are dead."
As human beings, we have trouble functioning in environments in which we feel threatened. The threat becomes the focus of our existence. But "safety" is one of the great illusions of the universe. Nowhere is it truly safe.
--Bene Gesserit Study on the Human Condition,
BG Archives, Section VZ908
T
he Handlers welcomed their visitors as friends and allies, wanting to hear more about their struggles with the Honored Matres. The group sat on the roof of one of the wide cylindrical towers. On a flat stone in the middle of the plank floor, a brazier sent a warm, comforting glow into the night.
"We knew you would be coming," Orak Tho said. "When you dropped the no-field to launch your small ships, we detected your great vessel above us. We are aware that you have also sent scavenging teams to uninhabited portions of our world. We were waiting for you to come visit us directly."
Squatting next to Sheeana, Miles Teg was surprised, since these people seemed to have very little technology. "It would take sensitive detectors to spot us."
"Long ago we developed a means to sense the ships flown by Honored Matres, for our own protection. Because those women think they are infallible, it is easier to detect them."
"Hubris is their principal weakness," Thufir Hawat said.
Green eyes flashed from the bandit mask of dark skin. "They have many weaknesses. We've had to learn how to exploit them."
They shared a meal of nuts, fruit, smoked fish, and medallions of a spiced dark meat that apparently came from an arboreal rodent. The Rabbi was more relaxed than Sheeana had ever seen him, though he seemed worried about the origin of the food. She could tell that the old man had already made up his mind: He wanted his people to settle here, if the Handlers would have them.
While they sat together on the open rooftop, listening to the buzz of night insects and watching the swoop of dark birds, Sheeana felt very isolated. According to scan reports, the Handlers' population was relatively large, with mines and industries in other parts of the world. They had apparently developed a quiet and peaceful civilization. "We assume your people originated in the Scattering, long ago after the Tyrant's death. Was this planet the first stop on your wandering?"
The Chief Handler shrugged his bony shoulders. "We have myths about that, but it was more than a thousand years ago."
"Fifteen centuries," Thufir suggested. He was a bright student. Considering his past and his place in history, the Mentat ghola was quite interested in spans of time.
"Our race spread to many nearby worlds. We were not an empire but a . . . political brotherhood. Then out of nowhere the Honored Matres came like a stampede of blind and clumsy animals, as destructive in their ignorance as in their malevolence." Orak Tho bent his elongated face toward the brazier's glow. Orange light washed across his skin.
&nbs
p; Other Handlers sat around the upper deck's circular wall, listening and muttering. Their distinctive body smells drifted into the cool air. Their race seemed to have an affinity for scents, as if smell was an important part of their communication abilities.
"Without warning, they came to pillage, destroy, and conquer." Orak Tho's face was as hard as petrified wood, his long jaw set. "Naturally, we had to stop this feral incursion." His lips curved in a faint smile. "So we developed our Futars."
"But how did you do that?" Sheeana asked. If these deceptively simple people could detect orbiting ships and create sophisticated genetic hybrids, their technology must be far more advanced than was evident.
"Some of those who joined us in settling these worlds were orphans of the Tleilaxu race. They showed us how to change our offspring to create what we needed, since God and evolution would be much too slow to provide them for us."
"The Futars," Teg said. "They are most interesting." After their initial reunion, the Handlers had taken the predatory creatures off to holding areas, where they could be with others of their own kin.
"What happened to these Tleilaxu?" The Rabbi looked around. He had never much liked Master Scytale.
