Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [11]
“The tank has no name. It is not a person and never was. Even when it could speak, it was only a female. We Tleilaxu never name our tanks, nor the females that preceded them.”
Expanding the image, he allowed the walls to disappear into a projection of a vast breeding house with tank after tank after tank; outside were the spires and streets of Bandalong. These visual cues should have been sufficient, but Scytale wished he could have added other sensory details, the female reproductive smells, the feel of the sunlight of home, the comforting knowledge of countless Tleilaxu filling the streets, the buildings, the temples.
He felt achingly lonely.
“I should not still be alive and standing before you. It offends me to be old and in pain, with my body malfunctioning. The kehl of true Masters should have euthanized me long ago and let me live on in a fresh ghola body. But these are not proper times.”
“These are not proper times,” the boy repeated, backing through one of the detailed holo-images. “You have to do things you would not otherwise tolerate. You must use heroic means to stay alive long enough to awaken me, and I promise you, with all my heart, that I will become Scytale. Before it is too late.”
The process of awakening a ghola was neither simple nor swift. Year after year, Scytale had applied pressures, reminders, mental twists to this boy. Each lesson and each demand built, like a pebble added to the pile, higher and higher, and sooner or later he would add enough to that unstable mound to trigger an avalanche. And only God and his Prophet could know which small stone of memory would cause that barrier to come crashing down.
The boy watched the flickering moods cross his mentor’s face. Not knowing what else to do, he quoted a comforting lesson from his catechism. “When one is faced with an impossible choice, one must always choose the path of the Great Belief. God guides those who wish to be led.”
The very thought seemed to consume Scytale’s last energy, and he slumped into a nearby chair in the simulation room, trying to recover his strength. When the ghola hurried to his side, Scytale stroked the dark hair of his alternate self. “You are young, perhaps too young.”
The boy placed a comforting hand on the old man’s shoulder. “I will try—I promise. I’ll work as hard as I can.” He squeezed his eyes shut and seemed to push, as if wrestling with the intangible walls inside his brain. At last, perspiring heavily, he gave up the effort.
The elder Scytale felt despondent. He had already used all the techniques he knew to push this ghola to the brink. Crisis, paradox, unrelenting desperation. But he felt it more than the boy did. Clinical knowledge was simply insufficient.
The witches had used some sort of sexual twisting to bring back the Bashar Miles Teg when his ghola was only ten years old, and Scytale’s successor was already two years past that mark. But he could not bear the thought of the Bene Gesserit women using their unclean bodies to break this boy. Scytale had already sacrificed so much, selling most of his soul for a glimmer of hope for his race’s future. The Prophet Himself would turn his back on Scytale in disgust. Not that!
Scytale placed his head in his hands. “You are a flawed ghola. I should have thrown away your fetus and started anew twelve years ago!”
The boy’s voice was rough, like torn fiber. “I will concentrate, and push my memories out of my cells!”
The Tleilaxu Master felt a weary sadness weighing him down. “It is an instinctive process, not an intellectual one. It must come to you. If your memories don’t return, then you are of no use to me. Why should I let you live?”
The boy was visibly struggling, but Scytale saw no flash of awe and relief, no sudden flood of a lifetime’s experiences. Both Tleilaxu reeked of failure. With each passing moment, Scytale felt more and more of himself dying.
The fate of our race depends on the actions of an unlikely collection of misfits.
—from a Bene Gesserit study on the human condition
In his second life,