Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [177]
Duncan was the same person again and again, perfecting himself, constantly filtering out impurities, like passing through a fine mesh strainer to sift out only the best of qualities, leaving him as the One. He allowed himself a secret smile at the irony. He had succeeded only because of the meddling of the Tleilaxu, though he was certain that the Masters had never intended to create a savior for humanity.
Duncan’s Mentat mind burned through the data, confirming his conclusion, knowing that the Oracle of Time must be correct. “Truly, I am the Kwisatz Haderach!” He wished Miles Teg could have been there with him. “And what of the great war—Kralizec?”
“We are in the midst of it now. Kralizec is not merely a war, but a point of change.” Her image flickered. “And you are the culmination of it.”
“But what about the rest of humanity?” Murbella. “They need to know. How will they understand what has happened?”
“My Navigators will inform them, perhaps even bring their leaders here. First, however, I need to eliminate a threat that should have been gone millennia ago. An enemy I fought ten thousand years before you were first born.”
The Oracle slid through the air toward the indignant-looking old man, Omnius. Facing him, she made her voice boom more loudly than the evermind’s speakers ever had. “I must ensure that the thinking machines can no longer harm anyone. That was my mission ages ago, when I was merely a woman, when I invented the concept of the foldspace engine, when I discovered the mind-expanding powers of melange. I shall remove you, Omnius.”
The evermind laughed, a remote old man’s chuckle. The slightly stooped manifestation suddenly grew larger, looming like a giant over her image. “You cannot remove me, for I am not a corporeal being. I am information, so my existence has spread anywhere the tachyon net stretches. I am everywhere.”
The female image formed a smile. “And I am more than that. I am the Oracle of Time. Now hear my laughter.” In an eerie voice Norma Cenva chuckled long and hard, causing even the oversized Omnius to take a step backward. “I am heard across star systems and eons, across time and space, far beyond the range of your net.”
Omnius took another step backward.
“First I crippled your fleet. Now I will rip you out like the weed that you are, and discard you.”
“Impossible—” The old man began to dissolve as he retreated into his own network.
“I will extract you—every shred of information from every node.” Her misty image became amorphous and seeped around Omnius. He nearly staggered into Erasmus, but the independent robot easily slid out of the way, his old-woman face expressing curiosity and bemusement.
“I will take you to a place where such information is no longer comprehensible, where physical laws do not apply.”
Duncan heard the evermind’s voice cry out in rage, but it was muffled. In the vaulted hall, the insectile sentinel robots who tried to move forward in the service of Omnius seemed strangely disoriented and sluggish.
“There are many universes, Omnius. Duncan Idaho has visited more than one, and he knows the place of which I speak. I rescued him and his no-ship from it long ago. You, however, will never find your way back.”
Duncan considered the incomprehensible struggle before him. Indeed, when he had first stolen the no-ship from Chapterhouse, he had lurched through the fabric of space in a desperate attempt to avoid capture and had taken them to a bizarrely skewed universe. He shuddered to think of it.
“Nothing shall rescue you, Omnius.”
“Impossible!” the old man bellowed, losing his physical form and becoming no more than a spangled outline.
“Yes, impossible. Wonderfully so.”
The air in the chamber crackled with clouds of electricity that spread thinner and thinner, as the Oracle wrapped herself like a net around the iconic thinking machine. For an instant, Duncan saw Norma’s face superimposed over that of the old man. The two countenances merged into one: Hers. The beautiful woman smiled, and the air filled with sparkling, hair-fine strands of electricity that she drew