Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [190]
“Fortunately I know how to go back into the dreaming essence of the Tyrant, the God Emperor. To the real son of Muad’Dib.” With a glance at her, he said, “I take my last few sips of humanity.” Then he entered the towering mouth and climbed over the maw-fence of crystalline teeth.
Sheeana understood what he was doing. She had tried the same thing herself, though ineffectively. The worm engulfed Leto II, closed its mouth, and reared back. The boy was gone.
Sheeana struggled to keep her knees from buckling. She knew she would never see Leto again, though he would be with the worms eternally, merged into Monarch’s flesh from the inside, becoming a pearl of awareness once more. “Goodbye, my friend.”
But the spectacle was not finished. The other worms rose beside Monarch, and all towered over her. Sheeana stood motionless, at once horrified and fascinated. Would they devour her, too? She steeled herself for her own fate, but had no fear of it. As a young girl, after a worm had destroyed her village on Rakis, Sheeana had run wildly out into the desert and screamed at the huge creature, calling it names, insisting that it eat her. “Well, Shaitan—do you have an appetite for me, now?”
But they did not want her. Instead, the seven worms gathered together, tumbling one upon the other, writhing like a mass of snakes. With Leto inside them now, the worms were transforming. Six worms wound themselves around the largest beast that had swallowed the boy. They twisted and twined, wrapping their sinuous bodies like vines around a tree, and then moved together.
Sheeana scrambled back up the rubble pile to keep herself safe from falling debris. The fleshy rings of the separate sandworms began to merge and metamorphose into a much larger form. The differentiation among the creatures became less distinct; the rings united, joining into one incredible sandworm: a behemoth greater even than the largest monsters from legendary Dune.
Sheeana stumbled, falling backward on the rubble but unable to tear her gaze away from the immense sandworm that towered in front of her, rippling and twining, its body stretching back hundreds of meters.
“Shai-Hulud,” she murmured, intentionally refusing to use the term Shaitan, just as she had always done. Truly, this was the godlike Old Man of the Desert. The dizzying odor of melange was stronger than ever.
At first she thought the leviathan would consume her after all, but the giant worm turned away and smashed down into the ground with a great thunder of noise, tunneling downward beneath the machine city.
Its new home.
A shudder of supreme pleasure ran through her. She knew the great worm would divide beneath the surface. This union between Leto II and the creatures would have a greater resistance to moisture, enabling them to survive until they could remake parts of this former machine planet into a domain of their own. One day, new sandworms would grow and thrive on this world, always lurking beneath the surface, always watching.
To defeat the humans, one option is to become like them, granting no quarter, chasing and destroying them to the last man, woman, and child. Just as they tried to do to us.
—ERASMUS,
databank on human violence
With my curiosity, ages of existence, and understanding of both humans and machines,” Erasmus mused as he and Duncan remained joined, fused together mentally and physically, “am I not the machine equivalent of a Kwisatz Haderach? The Shortening of the Way for thinking machines? I can be in many places at once and see a myriad of things that even Omnius never imagined.”
“You are not a Kwisatz Haderach,” Duncan said. He became aware of his comrades rushing toward him. But the liquid metal now flowed across Duncan’s shoulders and face, and he felt no desire to tear himself away.
Duncan let the physical reaction between him and the robot continue. He didn’t want to escape. As the new standard bearer of humankind, he needed to advance. So he opened his mind and let the data rush in.
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