Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [283]
“The Landsraad Council becoming altruistic?” The Baron snorted. “That’s even more unbelievable than Leto winning his case.”
From the surgery rooms down the long, dim halls, grisly noises could be heard, screams of agony that echoed along the corridors all the way to the Baron’s workroom. The muted glowglobes flickered, but maintained their low level of illumination.
The Baron looked piercingly at de Vries, then gestured toward the operating rooms. “Perhaps you’d better attend to this yourself, Piter. I want to make certain that idiot entertainment monitor survives his surgery . . . at least until I’ve made sufficient use of him.”
“Yes, my Baron,” the Mentat said and scuttled down the halls to the medical chambers. The screams grew higher-pitched and womanish. The Baron heard the sounds of sizzling cutterays and a grinding saw.
The Baron thought of his newly shortened plaything and what he would do to Yh’imm as soon as the painkillers began to wear off. Or could it be possible the doctors had managed their task without using any painkillers? Perhaps.
Rabban let his thick-lidded eyes fall closed in supreme pleasure, just listening and enjoying. Given the choice, he would rather have hunted the man down in Giedi Prime’s wilderness preserve. But the Baron thought that sounded like too much trouble—all that running and chasing and climbing snow-covered rocks. He could come up with far better ways of spending his time. Besides, the Baron’s limbs and joints had been growing increasingly sore of late, his muscles were weakened and trembled, his body was losing its edge. . . .
For now the Baron would simply make up his own sport. Once Yh’imm’s stumps were cauterized and sealed, he would pretend the hapless monitor was Duke Atreides himself. That would be fun.
The Baron paused and realized how foolish it was for him to be so upset over the failure of a single plan. For uncounted generations the Harkonnens had spun subtle traps for their hated mortal enemies. But the Atreides were difficult to kill, especially when their backs were to the wall. The feud extended all the way back to the Great Revolt, the betrayal, the accusations of cowardice. Since that time, Harkonnen had always hated Atreides, and vice versa.
And so it would always be.
“We still have Arrakis,” the Baron said. “We still control melange production, even though we’re under CHOAM’s thumb and the watchful eye of the Padishah Emperor.” He grinned at Rabban, who grinned back at him, strictly out of habit.
Deep in the heart of the dirty and dark grandeur of Harkonnen Keep, the Baron clenched his fist and raised it high in the air. “As long as we control Arrakis, we control our own fortunes.” He clapped a hand on his nephew’s padded shoulder. “We will wring spice from the sands until Arrakis is nothing more than an empty husk!”
The universe contains untapped and heretofore unimagined energy sources. They are before your very eyes, yet you cannot see them. They are in your mind, yet you cannot think them. But I can!
—TIO HOLTZMAN,
Collected Lectures
On the Spacing Guild world of Junction, the one who had been D’murr Pilru was brought before a tribunal of Navigators. They didn’t tell him the reason, and even with all his intuition and conceptual understanding of the universe, he could not fathom what they wanted from him.
No other trainees joined D’murr, none of the new Pilots who had learned the ways of foldspace with him. On a huge open parade ground of stunted blakgras, the sealed spice-filled tanks of the high-level tribunal were arrayed in a semicircle on grooved flagstones, where tracks from thousands of previous convocations could still be seen.
D’murr’s smaller tank sat in front of them all, solitary at the center of the semicircle. Relatively new to his life as a Navigator, still a low-ranking Pilot, he retained much of his human shape inside the enclosed tank. The members of the tribunal—Steersmen all, each inside his own tank—showed only bloated heads and monstrously altered eyes peering out through the murk of cinnamon-orange.