Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [194]
The aged body slumped quietly on the steps, and a long sigh flowed from the old woman’s lips. Her expression became utterly serene . . . and then went completely motionless, with the eyes staring straight ahead.
In death, the robot’s human shape held.
Where there is life, there is hope . . . or so the old sayings tell us. But for the truly faithful there is always hope, and it is not determined by either death or life.
—TLEILAXU MASTER SCYTALE,
My Personal Interpretations of the Shariat
Out under the burned sky of Rakis, Waff’s despair took him to a place as bleak and dry as the devastated landscape around him. On a vitrified dune nearby, only one of his precious armored sandworms stirred with the last flickerings of life, while the others were already dead. He had failed his Prophet.
The cellular modifications he had made were insufficient, and he had neither sandtrout specimens, nor the proper facilities to create additional test worms. He felt the last grains of sand slipping through the hourglass of his life. His body wouldn’t last long enough for him to try again with a new line of the hybrid worms, even if he’d had the chance. Only the hope of restoring these sandworms to Rakis had kept him from surrendering to the damage in his accelerated ghola body, but now he was falling apart.
Raising his fist to the sky and shouting into the dry, caustic air, he demanded answers from God, though no mortal had the right to do so. He hammered his hands on the hard, cracked ground and wept. His clothes were dirty, his face smeared with sooty residue. Sprawled atop what had once been magnificent dunes lay the dead worm specimens. Truly, they symbolized the end of all hope.
Rakis was forever cursed, if even the Prophet no longer wished to live there.
Then, as he huddled on the ground, Waff felt a shudder from deep beneath the surface. The resonant vibration grew stronger, and he looked up in wonder, blinking his stinging eyes. The last dying worm twitched, as if it, too, could sense something important happening.
With a thunderous crack in the thin, whistling air, a fissure raced across the glassy ground. Waff stumbled to his feet and stared at the zigzag progress of the widening split, hardly able to comprehend what he was seeing.
Widening, jagged lines appeared like fine fractures in reinforced plaz struck by a hard blow. The dunes bucked and heaved as something emerged from below.
Waff staggered backward. At his feet the last slumped sandworm stirred, as if to warn the Tleilaxu Master that it was about to end its days—and that the man, too, was about to die.
A sequence of explosions erupted like sand geysers from deep beneath the dunes. The crevices gaped wider, revealing forms stirring underground. As if in a waking dream, he saw enormous ridges crusted with stones and dust, huge behemoths rising in a cascade of sand.
Sandworms. Real sandworms—monsters of the size that used to roam the desert in the days when this world was known as Dune. A legend and a mystery reborn!
Waff stood transfixed, unable to believe, yet filled with awe and hope rather than fear. Were these survivors of the original worms? How could they still be alive after the holocaust?
“Prophet, you have returned!” At first he saw five of the gigantic sandworms, then a dozen emerging at once. All around him the broken ground spawned more and more. Hundreds of them! The whole dead world was like an immense egg, cracking open and giving birth.
Breaking free of their underground nest, the sandworms rampaged toward the distant encampment in the rubble of Keen. Waff supposed they would swallow up Guriff and his prospectors, devouring all of the Guildsmen.
The sandworms would make Rakis their own again.
He reeled forward in ecstasy, his hands raised in joyous worship. “My glorious Prophet, I am here!” God’s Messenger was so great that Waff felt like a minuscule speck, hardly worth noticing.
His faith swelled again, and he saw that his insignificant efforts on Rakis had never mattered. Regardless of how hard he had worked with the