Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [3]
While one doctor tended the now-sagging axlotl tank, the other dried the infant and wrapped her in a blanket. Unable to help feeling a tug at her heart, Jessica wanted to reach out and hold the baby, but resisted the urge. Would Alia suddenly start speaking, uttering voices from Other Memory? Instead, the baby looked around the medical center, without seeming to focus.
Others would care for Alia, not unlike the way Bene Gesserit sisters took baby girls under their collective wing. The first Jessica, born under the close scrutiny of breeding mistresses, had never known a mother in the traditional sense. Nor would this Jessica, nor Alia, nor any of the other experimental ghola babies. The new daughter would be raised communally in an improvised society, more an object of scientific curiosity than love.
“What an odd family we all are,” Jessica whispered.
Humans are never capable of complete accuracy. Despite all the knowledge and experiences we have absorbed from countless Face Dancer “ambassadors,” we are left with a confused picture. Nonetheless, the flawed accounts of human history provide amusing insights into the delusions of mankind.
—ERASMUS,
Records and Analyses, Backup #242
In spite of a decades-long effort, the thinking machines had not yet captured the no-ship and its precious cargo. That did not, however, stop the computer evermind from launching his vast extermination fleet against the rest of humanity.
Duncan Idaho continued to elude Omnius and Erasmus, who repeatedly cast their sparkling tachyon net into the nothingness, searching for their quarry. The no-ship’s veiling capability normally prevented it from being seen, but from time to time the pursuers caught glimpses, as of something concealed behind shrubbery. At first the hunt had been a challenge, but now the evermind was growing frustrated.
“You have lost the ship again,” Omnius boomed through wall speakers in the central, cathedral-like chamber in the technological metropolis of Synchrony.
“Inaccurate. I must first find it before I can lose it.” Erasmus tried to sound carefree as he shifted his flowmetal skin, reverting from his guise as a kindly old woman to the more familiar appearance of a platinum-surfaced robot.
Like overarching tree trunks, metal spires towered above Erasmus to form a vaulted dome within the machine cathedral. Photons glittered from the activated skins of the pillars, bathing his new laboratory in light. He had even installed a glowing fountain that bubbled with lava—a useless decoration, but the robot often indulged his carefully cultivated artistic sensibilities. “Do not be impatient. Remember the mathematical projections. Everything is nicely predetermined.”
“Your mathematical projections could be myths, like any prophecy. How do I know they are correct?”
“Because I have said they are correct.”
With the launch of the machine fleet, the long-foretold Kralizec had begun, at last. Kralizec . . . Armageddon . . . the Battle at the End of the Universe . . . Ragnarok . . . Azrafel . . . the End Times . . . the Cloud Darkness. It was a time of fundamental change, of the entire universe shifting on its cosmic axis. Human legends had predicted such a cataclysmic event since the dawn of civilization. Indeed, they had already been through several iterations of similar cataclysms: the Butlerian Jihad itself, the jihad of Paul Muad’Dib, the reign of the Tyrant Leto II. By manipulating computer projections, and thus creating expectations in the mind of Omnius, Erasmus had succeeded in initiating the events that would bring about another fundamental shift. Prophecy and reality—the order of things really didn’t matter.
Like an arrow, all of Erasmus’s infinitely complex calculations, running trillions of data points through the most sophisticated routines, pointed to one result: The final Kwisatz Haderach—whoever that was—would determine the course of events at the end of Kralizec. The projection also revealed that the Kwisatz Haderach was on the no-ship,