Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [106]
Under Uxtal’s direction, he and his assistants frantically installed new flexible tubing, refilled the reservoirs, pumped in stimulants and stabilizing drugs, and reconnected the monitors. He wiped sweat from his grayish brow.
Ultimately, Uxtal saved the tank. And the unborn ghola.
VLADIMIR THOUGHT HE’D been clever. In contrast, his punishment was swift, severe, and, for him, most unexpected.
He went directly to Hellica to tattle on Uxtal for his abuses, but the Matre Superior’s face was already flushed hot with anger. Ingva had been swifter, racing to the Palace to make her damning report.
Before the boy could tell his lying version of the story, Hellica grabbed him by the front of his shirt with fingers as sharp and strong as a tiger’s claws. “For your sake, you little bastard, the new ghola had better not be harmed. You wanted to kill him, didn’t you?”
“N-no. I wanted to play with him. Right now.” Terrified, Vladimir backed up a step. He tried to look as if he might cry. “I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I was trying to make him come out. I’m tired of waiting for my new playmate. I was going to cut him free. That’s why I took the knife.”
“Uxtal interrupted him before he could succeed.” Ingva slinked out from behind a hanging where she had been eavesdropping.
Her eyes flashing orange, the Matre Superior gave him a stern lecture. “Don’t be such a fool, boy! Why would you destroy when you can control? Is that not a better revenge against House Atreides?”
Vladimir blinked; this had not occurred to him.
Hellica discarded him, as if he were a bothersome insect. “Do you know what exile means? It means you’re going back to Dan—or wherever Khrone wants to stash you away. As soon as I can obtain a Guildship, you will be in his hands.”
“You can’t! I’m too important!” Even at a young age, his twisted little mind was beginning to understand plots and schemes, but he didn’t yet grasp the deep intrigues of the politics that prevailed all around him.
Hellica silenced him with a threatening frown. “Unfortunately for you, the ghola baby is far more important than you are.”
FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER
ESCAPE FROM CHAPTERHOUSE
The human body can achieve many things, but perhaps its greatest role is to act as a storage mechanism for the genetic information of the species.
—TLEILAXU MASTER WAFF,
at a kehl meeting on the Duncan Idaho ghola project
H
is ghola son was himself . . . or would be, once the memories within were brought to the surface. But that could not happen for several years yet. Scytale hoped his aging body would last long enough.
Everything the Tleilaxu Master had experienced and learned in countless sequential lifetimes was stored in his own genetic memory and reflected in the same DNA that had been used to create the five-year-old Scytale duplicate who stood before him. This was actually a clone, not a true ghola, because the cells had been taken from a living donor. The child’s predecessor was not dead. Yet.
But old Scytale could feel the increasing physical degeneration. A Tleilaxu Master should not fear death, because it had not been a real possibility for millennia—not since his race had discovered the means to immortality through ghola-reincarnation. Though his ghola child was flourishing, he was still much too young.
Year by year, the inevitable march of death paraded through his body’s systems, making his organs function less efficiently than they once had. Planned obsolescence. For millennia, the Masheikh elite of his race had met in secret councils, but never had they imagined a holocaust such as they now faced—such as Scytale now faced, as the last living Master.
Realistically, he did not know what he could accomplish alone. With unrestricted access to axlotl tanks, Scytale might have restored other Masters like himself, the true geniuses of his race. Cells of the last Tleilaxu Council had been stored within his nullentropy capsule, but the Bene Gesserit refused to consider creating gholas of those men. In fact, after the uproar surrounding the baby Leto II, as well as