Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [164]
The matching gholas stood in the line; some fidgeted, some remained defiant. It was a standard ghola-awakening technique, to drive a person to psychological and physical crisis, forcing the buried chemical memories to overcome the barriers inside.
“I don’t remember,” the Waffs all said in perfect unison.
A commotion interrupted them, and Uxtal turned as Matre Superior Hellica, resplendent in a purple bodysuit and flowing veils and capes, strode into the chamber leading a small Guild delegation and a floating, hissing chamber that held a mutated Navigator. Edrik himself!
“We came to watch the completion of your task, little man. And to reach financially acceptable terms with the Navigators, should you succeed.”
Surrounded by plumes of cinnamony-orange gas, Edrik approached a viewing window in his tank. The eight gholas felt the tension in the chamber increase.
Uxtal gathered enough courage to yell at the Waffs, though he seemed almost comical doing so. “Tell us how to make spice in the axlotl tanks! Speak, if you want to live.”
The Waffs understood the threat and believed it, but they had no memories to reveal, no stored knowledge. Sweat blossomed on their small gray foreheads.
“You are Tleilaxu Master Tylwyth Waff. All of you. You are everything he was. Before he died on Rakis, he prepared replacement gholas of himself here on Tleilax. We used cells from those”—he jerked his head toward the miserable mindless men on their extraction tables—“to create the eight of you. You hold his memories stored in your minds.”
“Obviously, they require more incentive,” Matre Superior Hellica said, looking bored. “Ingva, kill one of them. I don’t care which.”
Like a murderous machine, the old Honored Matre had been waiting to be activated. She could have attacked with a traditional flurry of kicks and blows, but she had come prepared for something more colorful. She drew a long slaughtering knife she had confiscated from the neighboring slig farmer. With a sideways sweep of the monoblade and a quick flash of blood, Ingva decapitated Waff Four in the middle of the line.
As the head hit the floor, Waff One cried out in sympathetic pain, along with his surviving brothers. The head rolled to a stop at an odd angle, to stare with glazing eyes at the blood pooling out from the neck stump. The gholas all tried to run like panicked mice, but were brutally restrained by the assistants.
Uxtal turned greenish, as if he might either faint or vomit. “The memories are triggered through psychological crisis, Matre Superior! Simply butchering one of them is not sufficient. It must be prolonged, an extended anguish. A mental dilemma—”
Hellica nudged the bloody head with her toe. “The torture wasn’t intended for this one, little man, but for the seven others. It’s a basic rule: If one inflicts only pain, the subject can cling to hope that the torture will end, that he may somehow survive.” A thin smile robbed the Matre Superior’s face of all beauty. “Now, however, the others have not the slightest doubt that they will be killed if I say they are to be killed. No bluffing. That certainty of death should provide the correct trigger . . . or they will all die. Now, proceed!”
Ingva left the small body lying there.
“Seven of you remain,” Uxtal said, reaching a crisis point of his own. “Which of you will remember first?”
“We don’t know the information you request!” Waff Six shouted.
“That is unfortunate. Try harder.”
As Hellica and the Navigator watched, Uxtal signaled Ingva. The woman took her time choosing, drawing out the tension, walking slowly up and down the ranks of the young gholas. The Waffs trembled and then shook, as she prowled behind them.
“I don’t remember!” Waff Three wailed.
Ingva responded by thrusting the point of her bloody slaughtering knife into his back and out his chest, piercing his heart on the way through. “Then you are of no use to us.”
Waff One felt a sharp pain strike his own heart, as if an echo of the blade had stabbed there, too.