Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [45]
In a magnanimous gesture, Hellica had given him plenty of female bodies to use as axlotl tanks, and he had already converted the one he needed (after botching the job three times previously). So far, so good. Along with all the equipment inside the primitive laboratory, the tank should be enough for him to achieve success. Now he simply had to create the ghola and deliver it, and Khrone would reward him (he hoped).
Unfortunately, that meant his ordeal here would last a minimum of nine months. He didn’t know if he could stand it.
Suspecting Face Dancers everywhere, he started growing a child from the mysterious cells salvaged from a dead Tleilaxu Master’s damaged nullentropy capsule. Meanwhile, on a daily basis, the Matre Superior made her impatience known for her supply of melange substitute. She was jealous of every second he diverted his attention from her needs. Panicked and exhausted, Uxtal was forced to satisfy both obligations, even though he had no experience at doing either.
As soon as the unidentified ghola baby was implanted in the first functional axlotl tank, Uxtal turned his efforts toward making the spice alternative. Since the whores already knew how to create the substance, Uxtal required no breakthroughs or flashes of genius in that area. He simply needed to manufacture the chemical in great quantities. The Honored Matres couldn’t be bothered to do it for themselves.
Gazing through a one-way security window into the gray sky, Uxtal felt as if the landscape of his soul was like the charred, lifeless hills he saw in the distance. He didn’t want to be here. Someday, he would think of a way out of this.
Born to an insular religious circle, Uxtal was deeply uncomfortable around dominant women. Among the Tleilaxu race, females were raised and then converted into brainless wombs as soon as they reached reproductive maturity. That was their only purpose. Honored Matres were the polar opposite of what Uxtal considered right and proper. No one knew the origin of the whores, but their propensity for violence seemed to have been bred into them.
He wondered if some foolish renegade Tleilaxu Master had actually bred the Honored Matres to hunt down the Bene Gesserits, much as Futars were supposedly bred to hunt down Honored Matres. What if the newly grown female monsters had gotten out of control, and the result was the destruction of all sacred worlds, the enslavement of a handful of Lost Tleilaxu, everything gone wrong?
Now, trying to look like a commanding administrator, Uxtal paced through the laboratory and watched two white-smocked lab assistants tend the special ghola tank.
A new modular building had just been brought in on a lift suspensor mechanism. The new laboratory wing was three times the size of the original facility, and required tearing down the neighboring slig farmer’s fences and appropriating a portion of his land. Uxtal had expected him to object and thus incur the wrath of the Honored Matres, but he had seen the fellow—was his name Gaxhar?—meekly move his sligs to another section of land. The women also demanded that the farmer provide them with a constant supply of fresh slig meat, which he did. Uxtal took a quiet pleasure in seeing someone so downtrodden, in knowing that he was not the only one helpless in Bandalong.
In the older laboratory, captured women were chemically lobotomized and converted into breeding vats. From separate operations in the new wing, Uxtal heard the muted screams of women being tortured, because pain (technically, the adrenaline, endorphins, and other chemicals the body produced in response to pain) was a primary ingredient in the special spice the Honored Matres craved.
Matre Superior Hellica had already gone to the new chambers to oversee the niceties. “Our facility will be ready