AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Smiling beatifically, the Tleilaxu Master lifted his face to heaven and exclaimed, "God, my God, I am yours at last!" With the speed and fury of a crashing Guild Heighliner, the worm descended. Waff inhaled a deep, satisfying breath of spice and closed his eyes in rapture as the monster's cavernous mouth engulfed him.
Waff became one with his Prophet.
Life is about determining what to do next, from moment to moment. I've never been afraid of making decisions.
--DUNCAN IDAHO,
A Thousand Lives
Through the broken cathedral's high dome, a preoccupied Duncan saw the sky flicker like a pattern changing in a kaleidoscope. A wealth of vessels appeared side by side, pulled along by the returning Navigator-controlled Heighliners.
Even before the signal came to him, Duncan sensed that someone very special was aboard one of the newly arrived ships. His expanded mind showed him her face, very little changed after all these years. Murbella! Some past part of him was terrified at the prospect of being near her again, but he was so much more than that now. He was eager to see her.
A thousand Navigator-faction Heighliners hovered over Synchrony, uncertain of their role, now that the Oracle was gone. Using his newly acquired abilities, Duncan communed with them all in a commondenominator language. The Navigators would understand him in their own way, as would the thinking machines and the humans. Duncan barely touched on his enhanced knowledge to do so.
Important changes. Necessary changes.
The human ships sent lighters down. Looking up through the dome's skylights Duncan saw the glints trailing through the sky and knew that Murbella would be with them. She would come down first, and he would see her again. Almost twenty-five years . . . a mere tick on the eternal clock, yet it had seemed an eternity all its own. He waited for her.
But the woman who entered the vaulted hall was Sheeana, worn and weary from her fighting out in the machine city. Her eyes were full of questions as she took in the blood on the floor, the smashed sentinel robots, the supine bodies of the Baron and glassy-eyed Paolo. Just by looking at the four young gholas Sheeana could tell that Paul and Chani had their memories back.
She noticed the motionless body of the old woman slumped on the stairs and recognized her. Speaking through Sheeana's mouth, the inner voice of Serena Butler lashed out. "Erasmus killed my innocent--the innocent baby. He was the one responsible for--"
Duncan cut her off. "I didn't hate him in the end. I think I pitied him more. It reminded me of when the God Emperor died. Erasmus was flawed, arrogant, and yet oddly innocent, guided only by insatiable curiosity . . . but he didn't know how to process what he already understood."
Sheeana stared down, as if expecting the old woman's eyes to snap open and a clawlike hand to grab her. "Erasmus is really dead, then?"
"Completely."
"And Omnius?"
"Gone forever. And the thinking machines are no longer our enemies."
"Do you control them, then? Have they been defeated?" Wonder shone on her face.
"They are allies . . . tools . . . independent partners more than slaves, and so different. We have a whole new paradigm to grapple with, and a lot of new definitions to make."
WHEN MURBELLA AND a party of Guildsmen and Sisters were ushered into the chamber by courier drones, Duncan set all questions aside and just stared at her.
She stopped in mid-step. "Duncan . . . you've hardly changed in more than two decades."
He laughed at that. "I've changed more than any instrument could measure." All the machines in the hall, in the whole city, turned toward Duncan at the comment.
He and Murbella embraced automatically, uncertain of whether this contact would rekindle their past feelings. But each sensed the difference in the other. The river of time had carved a deep canyon between them.
As he touched Murbella, Duncan felt a bittersweet sadness to know how much damage her addictive love had done to him. Things could never be the same between them again, especially now that he was the Kwisatz Haderach. He also guided the thinking machines, but he was not their new evermind, not their new puppet master. He didn't even know how they could exist without a controlling force. They had to adapt or die, something humans had done well for millennia.
From across the room, Duncan recognized the spark in Sheeana's eyes--of genuine concern rather than jealousy; no Bene Gesserit would allow herself the weakness of jealousy. In fact, Sheeana was such a staunch Bene Gesserit that she had stolen the no-ship from Chapterhouse and fled with her refugees, rather than abide by the changes Murbella had forced on the Sisterhood.
He spoke to both women. "We have freed ourselves from the traps we set for each other. I need you, Murbella--and you, Sheeana. And the future needs all of us more than I can express." An infinite number of machine thoughts coursed through his mind, giving him the sudden awareness that countless human planets needed help that only he could provide.
With a thought, he dispatched the guardian robots out of the hall, marching them away as if in a military exercise. Then he stretched his mind through the empty pathways of the tachyon net, and across the universe. With his instantaneous connection to all of the human defender ships once controlled by corrupted Ixian machines, as well as the machine battleships linked to Omnius's command--Duncan's command, now--he summoned the vessels to the former machine planet, dragging them all simultaneously through foldspace. They would all come here, to Synchrony.
"You, Murbella, were born free, trained as an Honored Matre, and finally made into a Bene Gesserit so that you could gather the loose ends. As you were a synthesis between Honored Matre and Bene Gesserit, so I am now a fusion between free mankind and thinking machines. I stand in both domains, understanding both, creating a future where both can thrive."
"And . . . what are you, Duncan?" Sheeana asked.
"I am both the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach and a new form of the evermind--and I am neither. I am something else."
Alarmed, Murbella glanced at Sheeana, then back at him. "Duncan! Thinking machines have been our mortal enemies since before the Butlerian Jihad--more than fifteen thousand years."
"I plan to untie that Gordian knot of misunderstandings."
"Misunderstandings! Thinking machines slaughtered trillions of human beings. The plague on Chapterhouse alone wiped out--"
"Such is the cost of inflexibility and closed-minded fanaticism. Casualties are so often unnecessary. Honored Matres and Bene Gesserits, humans and thinking machines, heart and mind. Don't our differences strengthen us
rather than destroy us?" The reality-expanding wealth of information Erasmus had given him was tempered by the wisdom he had earned through numerous lifetimes. "Our struggle has reached an end and a watershed." He flexed his hand, and he could feel innumerable thinking machines out there listening, waiting. "We have the power to do so much now."
Utilizing perfect prescient and calculational knowledge, Duncan knew how to bring about an everlasting peace. With humanity and thinking machines balanced in the palm of his hand, he could control them all and seize their powers, preventing them from making further war. He could force cooperation among the Navigator-faction Heighliners, the Ixian-modified ships, and the thinking-machine fleet.
With his developing prescience, he foresaw the joint future of humankind and thinking machines--and how to implement it every step of the way. Such breathtaking power, greater than the God Emperor or Omnius combined. But power had eventually corrupted Leto II. How, then, could Duncan handle this even greater burden?
Even if Duncan Idaho acted for the most altruistic of reasons, there were bound to be dissenters. Would he eventually be corrupted, regardless of his good intentions? Would history remember him as an even worse despot than the God Emperor?
Facing an avalanche of questions and responsibilities, Duncan vowed to use the lessons of his numerous lifetimes for the benefit and survival of the human race and thinking machines. Kralizec. Yes, the universe had indeed changed.
How terrible for a mother to bury her own daughter. There is no greater pain, not even the Bene Gesserit Agony. Now I have had to bury my daughter twice.
--LADY JESSICA,
Lament for Alia
Just one casualty among uncounted trillions.
Later, as Jessica gazed sadly at the cold form of her daughter, she knew that one little girl did matter as much as all the others. Each life had value, whether a ghola child or a natural-born person. The titanic struggle that changed the future of the universe, the defeat of the thinking machines, and the survival of the human race seemed as nothing to her. She was completely preoccupied with preparing Alia's body for burial.
