Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [156]
Beside him Chani gave a strangled cry, but the sound changed to a growl in her throat. She recognized the younger Paul, and also saw the terrible difference.
A cold sense of inexorability froze Paul’s blood as everything became clear. His prescient vision in the flesh! So, the thinking machines had grown another ghola of Paul Atreides to be their pawn, a second potential Kwisatz Haderach for their private use. Now he understood the recurring dreams of his own face laughing triumphantly, consuming spice, the peculiar image of himself stabbed and dying, bleeding out his life’s blood on a strange floor. Just like the one on which he stood now, in this vaulted chamber.
It will be one of us. . . .
“It seems we have an abundance of Atreides.” The Baron ushered his protégé forward, his hand clamped on the young man’s shoulder. Almost apologetically, as if the wary audience cared, he said, “We call this one Paolo.”
Paolo pulled away from him. “Before long you will call me Emperor, or Kwisatz Haderach—whichever term grants me the highest respect.” Looking on, the old man and Erasmus seemed to find the whole tableau amusing.
Paul wondered how many times he had been trapped by fate, by terrible purpose. How often and in how many circumstances had he seen himself dead from a knife thrust? Now he cursed the fact that he would face this crisis as a shell of his former self, not armed with the memories and skills of his past.
Unto myself, I must be sufficient.
Snickering, the younger boy walked to where his counterpart stood stiffly at attention. Paul looked back at his mirror image without fear. Despite the age difference, they were approximately the same height, and as Paul looked into his doppelganger’s eyes, he knew he must not underestimate this “Paolo.” The youth was a weapon as sure and deadly as the crysknife at Paul’s waist.
Jessica and Chani moved protectively close to Paul, ready to strike. His mother, with her memories restored, was a full Reverend Mother. Chani, though she did not yet have her past life, had shown considerable fighting skills in earlier practice sessions, as if she still felt Fremen blood in her veins.
Paolo’s brow furrowed, his expression flickering for just a moment. Then he sneered at Jessica. “Are you supposed to be my mother? The Lady Jessica! Well, you may be older than I am—but that doesn’t make you a real mother.”
Jessica gave him a brief, shrewd appraisal. “I know my family, regardless of the order in which they were reborn. And you are not one of them.”
Paolo crossed the chamber floor toward Chani, leering with exaggerated hauteur. “And you . . . I know you, too. You were supposed to be the great love of my life, a Fremen girl so insignificant that history recorded little of her youth. Daughter of Liet-Kynes, weren’t you? A complete nobody until you became the consort of the great Muad’Dib.”
Paul could feel her nails digging into his arm as she ignored the boy and talked to him instead. “The Bashar’s teachings were right, Usul. A ghola’s worth is not intrinsic in its cells. The process can go horribly wrong—as it clearly did with this young monster.”
“It’s more a matter of parenting,” the Baron said. “Imagine how the universe would be changed if the original Muad’Dib had received different instructions in the uses of power—if I had raised him, as I tried to do with the lovely boy, Feyd-Rautha.”
“Enough of this,” Omnius broke in. “My machine battleships are even now clashing with—or should I say annihilating?—the pathetic remnants of human defenses. According to my last reports, the humans were making simultaneous stands across space. That will allow me to destroy them all at once and be done with it.”
Erasmus nodded to the humans in the cathedral chamber. “Within a few more centuries your own warring factions would have torn your race apart anyway.”
The old man shot the independent robot an annoyed look. “Now that I have the final Kwisatz Haderach here, all the conditions have been fulfilled. It is time to end this. There is no need to bother with