Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [196]
She noticed the motionless body of the old woman slumped on the stairs and recognized her. Speaking through Sheeana’s mouth, the inner voice of Serena Butler lashed out. “Erasmus killed my innocent—the innocent baby. He was the one responsible for—”
Duncan cut her off. “I didn’t hate him in the end. I think I pitied him more. It reminded me of when the God Emperor died. Erasmus was flawed, arrogant, and yet oddly innocent, guided only by insatiable curiosity . . . but he didn’t know how to process what he already understood.”
Sheeana stared down, as if expecting the old woman’s eyes to snap open and a clawlike hand to grab her. “Erasmus is really dead, then?”
“Completely.”
“And Omnius?”
“Gone forever. And the thinking machines are no longer our enemies.”
“Do you control them, then? Have they been defeated?” Wonder shone on her face.
“They are allies . . . tools . . . independent partners more than slaves, and so different. We have a whole new paradigm to grapple with, and a lot of new definitions to make.”
WHEN MURBELLA AND a party of Guildsmen and Sisters were ushered into the chamber by courier drones, Duncan set all questions aside and just stared at her.
She stopped in mid-step. “Duncan . . . you’ve hardly changed in more than two decades.”
He laughed at that. “I’ve changed more than any instrument could measure.” All the machines in the hall, in the whole city, turned toward Duncan at the comment.
He and Murbella embraced automatically, uncertain of whether this contact would rekindle their past feelings. But each sensed the difference in the other. The river of time had carved a deep canyon between them.
As he touched Murbella, Duncan felt a bittersweet sadness to know how much damage her addictive love had done to him. Things could never be the same between them again, especially now that he was the Kwisatz Haderach. He also guided the thinking machines, but he was not their new evermind, not their new puppet master. He didn’t even know how they could exist without a controlling force. They had to adapt or die, something humans had done well for millennia.
From across the room, Duncan recognized the spark in Sheeana’s eyes—of genuine concern rather than jealousy; no Bene Gesserit would allow herself the weakness of jealousy. In fact, Sheeana was such a staunch Bene Gesserit that she had stolen the no-ship from Chapterhouse and fled with her refugees, rather than abide by the changes Murbella had forced on the Sisterhood.
He spoke to both women. “We have freed ourselves from the traps we set for each other. I need you, Murbella—and you, Sheeana. And the future needs all of us more than I can express.” An infinite number of machine thoughts coursed through his mind, giving him the sudden awareness that countless human planets needed help that only he could provide.
With a thought, he dispatched the guardian robots out of the hall, marching them away as if in a military exercise. Then he stretched his mind through the empty pathways of the tachyon net, and across the universe. With his instantaneous connection to all of the human defender ships once controlled by corrupted Ixian machines, as well as the machine battleships linked to Omnius’s command—Duncan’s command, now—he summoned the vessels to the former machine planet, dragging them all simultaneously through foldspace. They would all come here, to Synchrony.
“You, Murbella, were born free, trained as an Honored Matre, and finally made into a Bene Gesserit so that you could gather the loose ends. As you were a synthesis between Honored Matre and Bene Gesserit, so I am now a fusion between free mankind and thinking machines. I stand in both domains, understanding both, creating a future where both can thrive.”
“And . . . what are you, Duncan?” Sheeana asked.
“I am both the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach and a new form of the evermind—and