Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [179]
Up to this point, Gorus had called her battle strategy suicidal. Now, he looked as if he might try something foolish to stop her. “Why not negotiate with them? Would it not be preferable to surrender? We cannot stop them from destroying their targets!”
Murbella fixed her gaze on the Administrator as if he were weak prey. Even the Sisters who had started out as pure Bene Gesserits now reacted with a feral Honored Matre strength. They would never back down.
“And you base this suggestion on the success of your emissaries to the thinking machines? All those emissaries who disappeared?” Murbella’s voice sizzled like hot acid. “Administrator, if you’d like to seek another solution, I would be happy to eject you from an airlock and let you fly across the empty vacuum. As the last breath explodes out of your lungs, maybe you can gasp out your personal surrender terms. Be my guest, if you believe the thinking machines will listen to you.”
The desperate-looking Guildsman cringed. Around him, the Sisters moved to take control, ready for a final plunge.
Before Murbella could give the command, though, Janess broke in over their tight-linked channel, “Mother Commander! Something’s changed with the machine battleships. Look at them!”
Murbella examined the images on the viewing plate. The Enemy vessels no longer moved in a tight, efficient formation. They slowed and began to spread apart, as if they had no goal, like unmanned sailing ships becalmed on a vast cosmic sea.
Left suddenly leaderless.
To her amazement, the thinking-machine fleet floated listlessly in space.
Even when caught up in his own myth, Muad’Dib pointed out that greatness is only a transitory experience. For a true Kwisatz Haderach, there are no warnings against hubris, no rules or requirements to follow. He takes from all things and gives to all things, as he wishes. How could we have deluded ourselves into believing we could control such a one?
—Bene Gesserit analysis
After the Oracle vanished, Erasmus stared at the empty space in the center of the vaulted chamber, his head slightly cocked to one side. “Omnius is gone.” His voice sounded hollow to Duncan Idaho’s ears. “No vestige of the evermind remains in the network of thinking machines.”
Duncan felt his own mind racing, expanding, absorbing new information. The terrible Enemy he had sensed for so long—the threat that the Honored Matres had provoked—was no more. By removing the evermind, uprooting it from this universe and taking it elsewhere, the Oracle had disabled the vast thinking-machine fleet, leaving it without its controlling force.
And we still remain.
Duncan didn’t know exactly what had changed inside him. Was it simply the knowledge of his raison d’etre? Had he always had access to this potential without realizing it? Assuming Paul was correct, something had lain dormant inside Duncan for all those years, through all of the lives—original and ghola—a latent power that had grown with each iteration of his existence. Now, like a massive genetic program, he had to figure out how to activate it.
Paul and his son Leto II had the blessing and curse of prescience. With their memories restored, each could claim to be a Kwisatz Haderach. Miles Teg had possessed his phenomenal capacity to move at a speed beyond comprehension and might conceivably have become a Kwisatz Haderach himself. The Navigators in the clustered Heighliners overhead could use their minds to see through folds of space and find safe paths for the great ships to travel. The Bene Gesserits could control their bodies, down to their very cells. All had expanded on traditional human abilities, expressing humankind’s potential to exceed expectations.
As the ultimate and final Kwisatz Haderach, Duncan believed he might have the capability to do all of those things and much more, reaching the highest pinnacle of humanity. Thinking machines had never understood human potential, even though their “mathematical projection” credited the Kwisatz Haderach with