Sisterhood of Dune (52 page)

He spotted a desert woman leaving the headquarters and hurried to query her. She was hardened, weathered, and covered in dust. Her blue-within-blue eyes were bird-bright as he stopped her. She sneered at his offer of a bribe. “Information is not a thing to be bought or sold, but to be shared, or withheld—as I see fit.”

The woman brushed past him, but he persisted. “I’m looking for a man named Vorian Atreides. He’s somewhere on Arrakis, but I don’t know where to look.”

Her brows drew together, and she fixed a breathing mask over her mouth. She seemed anxious to go. “What do you want him for?”

“I need to speak with him about a personal matter. He knew my family a long time ago.”

She didn’t seem to believe him, had a strange, agitated look on her face. “I have never heard of the person you seek. You’re wasting your time.” He thanked her as she hurried out into the street, showing no more interest in him.

*   *   *

THE DESERT’S QUIET
emptiness gave Vorian a sense of serenity, especially at night. He missed his contented nights in a familiar bed with Mariella, yet felt comfortable among these Freemen, though they remained wary and suspicious of him; he doubted they would ever accept an outsider, even if he spent the rest of his life here.

From the other desert people, he’d heard tales of the tribulations endured by the Freemen, the generations of slavery, how their ancestors rioted on Poritrin and stole an experimental spacefolder ship for a mass exodus from the League Worlds, only to crash here on Arrakis. They joined with the descendants of a legendary desert outlaw, Selim Wormrider. All that history, unknown and unwritten, was fascinating to Vor—the rest of the Imperium was entirely unaware of it.

He liked to sit outside under the stars. He looked up now as the two moons drew close in the sky, the lower and faster satellite approaching its cousin. The Freemen had set out innovative dew collectors among the rocks, condensing a faint trace of moisture as the atmosphere cooled. Most of Sharnak’s people were asleep, and those on sentry duty ignored him.

As he pondered these things, his eyes spotted a flicker of movement in the shadowy rocks below. For an instant, moonlight exposed a pair of figures, which vanished again into black obscurity. Alert, he tried to convince himself that he had seen a pair of evening scouts sent out by Naib Sharnak. Who else could possibly be out here, and how would they survive?

Sitting motionless, he studied the rocks for a long moment, caught another moving shadow, then crept back inside and closed the cave’s moisture door as he looked for one of the camp guards.

By now he had grown accustomed to the wealth of unusual smells and common background noises of people crowded together with very little comfort or privacy. The tunnels were dark and silent, but he found one of the sentries, a sour-faced man with a patchy beard. The man seemed annoyed at the interruption of his nocturnal wanderings.

“I saw something outside,” Vor said. “You should find out what it is.”

“There is nothing out there but rocks and sand—and Shai-Hulud, if you are unfortunate enough to see him.”

“I saw two figures out there.”

“Only ghosts or shadows. I have lived in the desert all my life,
offworlder.
”

Vor bristled, spoke loudly. “Once, I commanded the entire Army of Humanity, and fought more battles than you could imagine. You should at least look into it.”

Hearing voices, another sentry came up, one of the young men who had been dispatched to investigate the spice-harvesting site. For days now, Inulto had listened to Vor talk about Arrakis City, Kepler, and Salusa Secundus, all of which were equally exotic to him. He seemed inclined to believe Vor, and said, “Come, we’ll wake up Naib Sharnak and let him decide.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” said the sour-faced sentry. “I forbid it.”

Inulto scoffed, showing little respect for the other man. “You forbid nothing, Elgar.” Ignoring him, the scout led Vor to Sharnak’s quarters, muttering in a sarcastic tone, “Elgar thinks he’ll be our Naib one day, but he can’t even lead the tribe when only five of us are awake.”

They called at the curtain, and Naib Sharnak came out, blinking and grumbling. His dark, gray-shot hair, normally braided, was spread out in a flowing fan, rumpled by sleep. However, before Vor could tell the leader what he had seen, shouts came from down the stone corridor, and a piercing scream.

Sharnak was instantly awake, yelling to rouse his people. The men and women of the caves bounded out of their sleeping chambers, calling their fellows to arms; they had not forgotten being preyed upon by slave hunters, even after generations of relative peace.

“Give me a weapon!” Vor shouted. Inulto had only one knife, but Sharnak kept a pair of the milky-white daggers. Grudgingly, he handed one to Vor, and the three ran down the corridor.

The moisture-seal door had been broken open, and two bodies lay on the stone floor. Vor ran toward the flurry of fighting inside the tunnel just in time to see Elgar, looking panicked. One of the intruders grabbed him from behind, tugged on his hair, planted a knee in his back, and snapped his spine. The attacker then discarded him, tossing the body to the floor.

Vor stared at Andros and Hyla. They saw him and smiled. “Oh, there you are,” the young man said.

“Who are you?” Rage filled Vor, and he held the knife in front of him, though he remembered the minimal effect weapons had on these two. “How do you know me?”

Andros and Hyla were not concerned about the dozens of Freemen fighters who came to face them. The young woman took a step forward, casually placing her heel on Elgar’s broken spine. “You are Vorian, son of Agamemnon—don’t you recognize us?”

The young man said, “We know what you did to our father and the rest of the Titans … how you betrayed us all.”

Hyla stepped forward. “But blood runs strong and thick, and you are our brother. Maybe we can find it in our hearts to forgive you.”

Brother?
Vor felt as if an asteroid impact had rocked his entire world. He knew that General Agamemnon had kept sperm samples from centuries ago, before he had discarded his human body. Hoping to find a worthy successor, Agamemnon had used surrogate mothers to bear sons for him, all of whom he’d found inadequate. Vorian had been his best hope, and later his greatest disappointment. Vor could not deny that these two appeared to share the Atreides genes, but one was a daughter.

“Come with us,” Hyla said, “and we’ll decide your worth.”

“Or should we kill all these others first?”

With a brave and foolish yell, Inulto threw himself toward Andros, slashing with the dagger. The moment he moved, Hyla dismissively reached out and caught the young man’s throat with one hand. Inulto flailed, stabbed with his knife as she crushed his larynx and tossed him on the floor like a broken doll. Her skin and her brother’s flickered with quicksilver. The knife cuts on her arm went only as deep as the topmost layer of skin, with hardly any blood.

As soon as Hyla killed Inulto, five of the desert men rushed forward, howling. The twins fought them like a pair of dust-devils, breaking bones, smashing skulls, crushing opponents against the walls.

“Stop!” Vor yelled, then turned to Sharnak. “Tell your fighters to back away. I’ll go with them. I never wanted any of your people hurt.”

But the leather-skinned Naib looked furious. He shouted to two fighters, “Restrain Vorian Atreides. Keep him away from those two.”

As the desert men grabbed his arms, Vor struggled, but they were very strong. “Let me fight my own battles, damn you!”

“No—because that is exactly what they wish,” Sharnak said. “They can’t have you. And if you are in league with them…”

Now the Freemen warriors attacked the twins in force, and proved to be far more difficult opponents than a weary spice-harvesting crew. Through sheer ferocity, they drove Andros and Hyla back as they hacked away at the quicksilver-impregnated skin. One fighter managed to slice just beneath Andros’s left eye, nearly gouging it out.

The momentum of the onslaught pushed the twins back toward the broken moisture door. They looked furious, still intent on capturing Vor and obviously appalled at their failure.

“We will spill your blood across the sand and dump your bodies—even Shai-Hulud will spit you out,” the Naib shouted to them.

“You are unworthy opponents,” Andros said with a sneer.

Vor was determined not to let these people fight for him, but he could not break free. At least eight desert warriors lay broken and probably dead on the cave floor, but the rest showed no sign of backing away, and more came running from the deep tunnels. The brother and sister hesitated as if calculating the odds, then reacted at the same instant, making the same choice.

Their last glance at Vor was filled with promises and threats. Ignoring the Freemen who had fought them to a standstill, the bloody twins retreated through the moisture lock and vanished like a whiff of steam from a hot rock.

Naib Sharnak shouted, “Find them. Kill them!” But Vor knew it would be no use. He had no idea if the twins had a vehicle or aircraft, or if they had somehow crossed the desert on their own, but he would not underestimate them.

The Naib breathed hard, and his voice carried a murderous tone. “I will have satisfactory explanations, Vorian Atreides, or I will have your water.”

When the warriors released him, Vor calmly faced the tribal leader. Long ago, he had pretended to side with the cymek general so that he could betray him and save humanity. He had taken his father’s preservation canister and dumped the twisted brain out of a high tower, so that it splattered on the frozen cliffs below. After that victory, Vor had thought there would be peace, but obviously the stain of the Titans wasn’t completely eradicated.

Now, the desert people were outraged and stunned that a mere two opponents could cause so much damage, and Vor realized he needed to tell what he knew. “I’ll give you all the explanations I have, about who I am and what I’ve done in the past, but I doubt they will be enough.”

There are many journeys in life, but few take you to the brink of death and then bring you back. After such a monumental struggle, you find yourself on a perch that is much, much higher than the one you occupied before.

—
REVEREND MOTHER RAQUELLA BERTO-ANIRUL,
shortly after her transformation

The poison swirled around her mind like a storm; mental clouds and winds swept away her concentration and attempted to steal her life.

Abruptly, Dorotea’s body jerked, and her eyes opened wide.

Through a small pinpoint of awareness, she discovered that she was in a hospital room … in the Sisterhood’s infirmary, she realized, lying on a bed surrounded by medical equipment. She recognized this as the place where the comatose Sisters were kept alive, those who had failed the test to become a Reverend Mother, and yet survived.

Two women discussed her condition within earshot. Dorotea found she couldn’t move; her body was too weak. She lifted one finger and then another, but that was all she could manage. In a blur, she remembered taking the carefully calibrated poison, then losing control as her body betrayed her, falling to the canopy.

Valya—was she there, too? Dorotea couldn’t turn her head. The last thing she remembered, in the real world, was seeing the other young woman take the drug.

And then Dorotea had been lost on a long journey inside herself.

The medical Sisters still had not noticed her. She blinked again, and found that her consciousness was split, as if her brain had been cracked open and jammed with a new awareness, dominating and overriding what had been there previously. Closing her eyes, she heard voices inside her head, whispering … and all of them sounded female, like a crowd of spectators looking at her from the inside out. The words were faint at first and then so loud and powerful that she could not ignore them. Dorotea felt a sensation of great antiquity there, of ancient women calling to her across vast distances.

When she focused her concentration on the voices, trying to hear and comprehend, a flood of memories came to her, a vivid part of her experience … yet not from her own lifetime. Ancient women spoke to her, sometimes simultaneously, although she could absorb everything they were saying. The recollections were startling and real, and she began to order them in her mind, realizing that they formed a chain of lives stretching back one generation at a time, all the way into the dim past of human history.

She saw bloodlines unfolding within her, links in a chain of lives: a woman from centuries ago, Karida Julan on the planet Hagal, who had taken a dashing young military officer as her lover and given birth to a daughter, Helmina Berto-Anirul … who in turn bore a daughter—Raquella Berto-Anirul, the Reverend Mother. And
her
daughter was Arlett … Dorotea’s mother!

Raised on Rossak from birth, Dorotea had never known her mother, and saw now through ricocheting displaced memories that Sister Arlett had been cast out after giving birth to her, dispatched to wander the scattered worlds and recruit acolytes for the Sisterhood. In all those years, she had not been allowed to return to the Rossak School, to her daughter. Where was she now? Dorotea was not certain.

But Raquella was here at the school … Dorotea’s grandmother! The Reverend Mother had never said a word of it, never acknowledged her. And soon Dorotea saw more from the past and learned things she didn’t want to know.

Like an image in a distorted mirror, she watched the separation and abandonment of the baby daughter—herself—from two different sides. A distraught Arlett begging to raise and love the little girl, and the stern Raquella insisting that such connections could not be permitted. All Sisters should be trained as equals as part of the larger community, she said, without the distractions of family ties. Arlett had to abandon her baby, Raquella had to brush her aside, and Dorotea had to spend her life in complete ignorance of the truth.

Yes, she saw it in her new library of memories. The Reverend Mother had torn them apart. Through the sudden infusion of information, Dorotea realized the far-reaching implications, saw the extent of what Raquella had done. Because of her conflict with Arlett,
all
of the babies in the nursery had been switched, and their names removed so that the girls were merely “daughters of the Sisterhood.”