Dune: The Machine Crusade (42 page)

She had always considered him a friend, a supporter, the closest thing she had to a protective older brother. But she had never considered a deeper love with him— not because she didn’t want to, but because she had never imagined the possibility. She looked at her small hands, the blunt fingers. “But… me?I am not an attractive woman, Aurelius. Why would you want to marry me?”

“I just told you.”

She looked away. This was too much to process at once, and her thoughts were in complete turmoil. It was very unsettling. She had no idea anymore which calculations had been in her mind. “But… I have too much work to do, and it would not be fair to you. I can’t afford… diversions.”

“Marriage is about sacrifices.”

“A marriage based on sacrifices would lead only to resentment.” She met his gaze and shook her head stubbornly. “Let’s not rush into this. We need to consider all the implications.”

“Trust me, Norma, this isn’t an experiment where you can control all the factors ahead of time. I am a busy man, too. I understand how much your work means to you. VenKee obligations will keep us apart for long periods, but that will also give you the time you need for your work. Think about it logically, at least, but let your heart decide.”

She smiled and then, startled, looked back down to a calendar tag on the top of her table. “Oh, is it so soon that you leave for Arrakis?”

“You will have time to think. We’ve waited this many years, and I can wait a while longer. When you say you’ll consider my proposal, I know you’ll give it the most diligent attention I could ever hope for.” Venport unfastened the smooth, slick soostone and handed it to her. “For now, will you at least accept my gift? A token of our friendship?”

“Of course.” Her fingers traced the slick, pearly surface of the soostone. She smiled sadly. “You see? You have already been a diversion— though a pleasant one. Aurelius, have I truly been so oblivious that I never noticed your feelings for me?”

“Yes.” He smiled. “And I promise you, I will not have changed my mind by the time I come back.”

MANY MONTHS FROM Poritrin and Norma now, Venport cruised over the Arrakis desert in a scout flyer, accompanied by his mercenary guards. He didn’t need NaibDhartha along on this expedition. His attention was focused on the monotonous landscape.

Out of long experience he thought in terms of controlling costs. He always considered how he might bypass wasteful middlemen in his diversified operations. Direct access was the key to gaining the most profit, whether the product was pharmaceuticals, glowglobes, or melange.

Thus far, since the Zensunnis were willing to take the risks and claimed to be experts in the harsh terrain of Arrakis, Venport and Keedair had avoided setting up their own spice-harvesting operations. But what if VenKee Enterprises hired outside workers and ran the operations directly, bypassing Naib Dhartha and all the problems he presented?

The scout flyer rattled as it hit turbulence. In the compartment beside him, mercenaries cursed at the pilot he had hired at the Arrakis City Spaceport, but he paid them no attention. Gueye d’Pardu was an offworlder who had emigrated here at a young age and gone into business as a guide, though he found little enough business on such an isolated world. D’Pardu had promised to find exotically beautiful “spice sands” for Venport.

Dust on the horizon obscured the early-morning sun, allowing no color to penetrate. Static crackled over a speaker in the passenger compartment as the pilot deigned to address them. “Monitoring storm ahead. Weather satellite shows it heading out into the Tanzerouft, so we should be all right. We need to keep an eye on it, though.”

“What’s the Tanzerouft?” Venport asked.

“Deep desert. Extremely dangerous out there.”

They soared ahead for another half hour. The flyer ran alongside a cliff, then turned toward the ruddy sun and out over the yawning desert.

Back in the village, Venport had heard natives talk about Arrakis as if it were a living creature with a spirit of its own. Amused at the comments, he had discarded them out of hand, but now as he flew over the dunes he wondered if perhaps the natives had been right after all. He felt peculiar, as if someone were watching him. He and the few men with him were isolated out here. Vulnerable…

The tan landscape began to change, revealing swirls of rusty brown and ocher. “Spice sands,” d’Pardu said. With his soft flesh and hanging jowls, the guide seemed out of place on a planet where most of the people appeared desiccated.

“It looks like something stirred up the ground,” Venport noted. “The wind, I presume?”

“In the desert it is unwise to presume anything,” d’Pardu said.

At a viewing station, Venport glanced through a window at a sinuous shape moving effortlessly through the dunes. The sands were in motion, as if awakening from an extended slumber. A chill ran down his spine. “What the hells is that? Gods— sandworms?” He leaned closer, amazed. He had heard of the huge beasts, which caused almost as much havoc for the spice-gathering crews as the outlaw raiders, but he’d never seen one before.

The guide scowled, opening up new wrinkles on his already creased, weathered face. “Demon of the Desert.”

Below, the sinuous, grayish beast undulated like a row of living hills, cresting over and through the dunes at an astonishing speed, keeping pace with the flyer above.

“Look at its back!” one of the guards exclaimed. “Do you see the shapes? People! People are riding the worms!”

“Impossible,” d’Pardu said with a sniff, but as he looked out the window he seemed unable to say anything further, and simply stared.

The dust picked up, blurring the view, but Venport thought he could still see the tiny figures, little specks… clearly human-shaped. No one could domesticate such monsters.

D’Pardu yelled, “We’d better leave. I have a bad feeling.” Winds began to buffet the aircraft.

Agreeing with the guide, Venport said, “Just get us out of here.”

The flyer circled around and headed back to Arrakis City. The desert storm chased them as if it were a living, sentient sky and they had ventured where they did not belong. All the way, the guards chattered about what they had seen. In the spaceport bars that evening, listeners would probably laugh at their stories.

But Venport had seen it for himself. If the rewards of melange were not so tremendous, he would never have risked doing business here. Who could deal with people who survived in such a godforsaken place?

They ride giant worms!

N
ow that she was no longer working for him, riding on his coattails, Tio Holtzman was not surprised at how quickly Norma Cenva faded from public attention. For an entire year he had not thought much about her, not since Aurelius Venport had negotiated her termination from his service. Holtzman smiled.
A superior businessman indeed.
What had Venport been thinking?

Though she had incomparable mathematical and scientific expertise, Norma simply did not have the knack to see the potential of her own discoveries. Pure genius was only one part of the equation— one needed to know what to
do
with a significant breakthrough. And that was where Norma had always failed.

Ah well, she was off on her own now and no longer a financial burden to him, even though VenKee’s initial repayments of glowglobe profits would have paid her expenses thousands of times over. How could they all be so naïve?

Venport had offered Lord Bludd a tidy sum of money to purchase a group of “technically adept slaves” to work at Norma’s new facility— somewhere upriver?— so the Savant had happily surrendered an entire group of his troublesome Zensunnis and Zenshiites. After the shutdown of the delta shipyards, Holtzman hadn’t known what to do with all the workers anyway… until one disgruntled slave had had the audacity to confront Lord Bludd himself. The nobleman had rebuked Holtzman for not keeping sufficient control over his workers, and the Savant had been glad to send the troublemakers to Norma Cenva.

He was pleased to be rid of them. And Norma, as well. All problems solved.

But in a sense, Holtzman was also disappointed to have the dwarfish woman gone. For the first few years of her apprenticeship on Poritrin, he and Norma had been a good team, and the Savant had profited greatly from her eager, youthful assistance. But she had wanted to dabble on her own for decades, with no apparent sense of when to give up on a fruitless and costly mathematical development that led nowhere.

Still, he wanted her to know that he didn’t hold a grudge. For years now, he had occasionally sent her polite invitations to formal receptions, but Norma always declined them with the flimsy excuse that she was “too busy.” The tiny woman had never understood how more progress could be achieved through politics and connections than through direct research.

Luckily, his newest young assistants were impatient to make their mark on history. Their work kept his own position secure.

If asked in public, Holtzman invariably said that Norma had served him well, as a competent assistant who showed occasional flashes of insight. Such gentlemanly modesty and generosity only added to the great inventor’s aura and increased stature. Then he would smile and turn the discussions to his own accomplishments.

As time went by, the Savant gave less and less thought to Norma Cenva.

FADING FROM THE limelight did not concern her in the least. Working in the calculation rooms and inspecting the daily progress of the fabrication of new Holtzman Effect engine components, Norma was perfectly happy with her isolation.

She had never understood all of the machinations around her, nor did she give them much importance. Her major concern was the critical work itself, pursuing concepts without regard to politics, egos, or time-wasting social necessities.

Her funding came from VenKee Enterprises, she owned her slave workers, and Tuk Keedair’s security force had been drawn from outside of Poritrin. No one had any reason to pay attention to her work here in her lab, far from prying eyes.

But the Tlulaxa business partner was much more concerned with security than Norma had ever been. At first, Keedair had suggested establishing an elaborate holosystem that would blur the above ground buildings and the dry-waterfall cave opening. But with the construction and fabrication teams, all the materials sent upriver, and the constant flow of food and supplies, it was impossible to believe that no one would notice the research complex. Instead, Keedair relied on his guards to scare off any curious trespassers, though they looked bored as they paced around the hangar and grounds, on endless patrol.

Before long, Norma would be finished. She hoped to have the prototype space-folding ship ready before Aurelius Venport returned from Arrakis. Norma smiled whenever she thought of that most special man, and missed him very much. She still couldn’t believe the surprise gift he had given her before departing. His fumbling question and the look in his eyes seemed to astonish him as much as it did her….

Perhaps by the time she achieved the dream that had dominated her thoughts since the beginning of the Jihad, Norma could give Aurelius an answer to his question. She did love him with all her heart and had never realized it. For her whole life she had shunted her emotions aside. No longer. When he came back to Poritrin, things would be different.

But first—

The heart of her work, the large old-style cargo ship, rested on a drydock platform inside the hangar. Sluggish and antiquated, it was worthless as a commercial vessel because of its inability to keep up with the craft of highly competitive space merchants. But it was everything Norma needed.

Now, high inside the clatter and bustle of the construction hangar, Norma stood on a suspensor platform over the patched hull. Making mental notes, she supervised a crew of Zensunni workers as they made mechanical modifications below, following the daily instructions she gave them.

The workers scurried around inside the large hull, shouting to each other and clanging tools. The rear of the old vessel had been torn open, its outdated engines gutted and removed, part of the cargo area reconfigured to hold her newly designed components. It was all coming together perfectly. After decades, she could see the end in sight, and it made her giddy.

Aurelius would be proud of her.

While Norma based her plan for folding space on concise mathematical formulas and proven laws of physics, such concepts were merely building blocks for something much grander, an intricate, almost ethereal design that could not be committed to paper or envisioned all at once. At least not yet. It was growing in her mind.

Each day she built upon her previous work, often staying up all night to modify and recalculate, installing a modular panel here, a magnetic winding or a Hagal quartz prism there. Like a master chef, she added ingredients as they occurred to her, going with a prescient sense bolstered by her theoretical proofs. Currents of thought and movement occurred to her on a mounting, incredibly large scale, as if by divine inspiration.

Savant Holtzman would laugh at me if I even suggested such a thing!

As work progressed, the crews performed quality-control and bench tests according to her exacting specifications. Each part must function properly.

Watching the breakthrough engines take shape beneath her, Norma felt a rush of excitement. Much was at stake here, not only for herself and VenKee Enterprises, but for the entire human race.

The implications of her remarkable technology would continue long past the defeat of the thinking machines. Space-folding engines would change the human race and reshape the future. Consequences cascaded like waterfalls in her imagination, stretching her ability to grasp them. At times such as this, when Norma took the capabilities of the human mind to unbelievable extremes, she hoped it would not drive her insane.

But if she could surmount the technological challenges of this venture, Norma and her backers would travel between star systems, exponentially faster than the limits of contemporary technology. It would aid the Army of the Jihad immensely, and she had every reason to expect that it would lead, at last, to victory.