Category: Ciconia

When the Sandworms Cry XII

The pieces had been gathered

The pieces had been lined up

Out opponent isn’t here yet. Perfect

—From “Book of Kings” Harkonnen Library.

The small rock formation could hardly be seen from a distance, though Satoko already expected it to be that way, hidden in plain sight. The way the Dune battle tactics were against the Harkonnen required the Fremen to have outposts in the middle of the desert, there had to be one near Arrakeen, one where Rika could actually walk to, and surely enough there it was. Satoko landed the ‘topher near the entrance, making sure not to land on sand, or else they would be calling a sandworm.

Mion and Shion were to wait outside, they had a heavy load of spice. Satoko walked in noticing the heavy pungent aroma of the water of life, concentrated spice essence, the smell alone began driving Satoko’s awareness to new places.

“You are not Rika” Satoko saw the witch sitting inside the cave.

Bernkastel began to laugh “It’s a miracle on its own! You know who I am”

Satoko sighed. There was always the risk of her coming back. She neared the witch inside the cave.

Benkastel signaled the floor “Drink! You are wasting your full potential as is! You know what you are. Atreides were bred to see the future, Harkonnens were mentats, even Abulurd, that old fool was hard to overcome, he was not trained as one, but you know he had plans within plans”

Satoko smirked “Stating the obvious, are we? If it is certain then I know it. I found you in the middle of the desert, I could tell your plan would work but there was a risk. How did you avoid getting killed by the Emperor?”

Bernkastel opened her eyes, Satoko wasn’t omniscient but she very much seemed like it. She knew I’d meet the Emperor in Arrakeen, or someone related to him. “He cannot see other prescient people, and our group was small enough for him not to care. Greater forces are against him”

“The right place at the right time” Satoko said, that was Rika’s style, she played such a dangerous game that to make it work it had to be a miracle, though Satoko helped, she knew which miracles were more certain. She bowed down and drank from the water of life, there was no way she could talk to Bernkastel, her own mind would be overcome soon enough.

The awareness exploded, like a computer finally making connections it had not seen before, the possibilities opened before her like a tree. This was not prescience Satoko couldn’t calculate what she did not see, but after the purification of the water of life, it seemed like it was prescience, a mentat of such capacity that she could tell the causes and effects of what she knew. Yes this was what the Bene Gesserit wanted out of the Harkonnen, Rika’s prescience along with this mental capability would indeed be a match for the Emperor himself, perhaps even more so, now that it was a fact that people like Rika was a blind spot to him.

Satoko could see the memories of past reverend mothers, even before times of the guild, times of old terra. Yes it was there where she could see it clear as day, Arafel, God’s judgement upon humanity, the destruction of earth… Old Terra, was their doing.

Tleilaxu came from old earth! Tleilaxu had engineered modern humans! Their technology was way more ancient than it seemed. There it was, the first Tleilaxu Master, she had those Harkonnen eyes and lips as well. She had destroyed her own sanity in exchange for higher brain function. It was her and her proto-face dancer that saved humanity from certain extinction. She even discovered the Holtmann field, lost during the destruction of Terra, only to be discovered again by humans ages in the future. Vier Dreissig, her bloodline moved forward to create what is today the Harkonnen, she did not have children after that, she did not share her blood with the Tleilaxu after their escape.

Dreissig not only found the Holtzman theorem first, she found its implications, not just a set of equations, but the entire backbone of it, the unified theory, the key to controlling the Holtzman Engine, or 8MS as Dreissig called it. Bene Gesserit had seen those numbers, after all Satoko was not the first in her bloodline to be a Reverend Mother, but she was the first who could understand what those numbers meant, she herself has toyed with those equations before finding a roadblock when the quantification of the small met the relativity of the large, all unified beautifully with the Dressig conversion, the conversion that unified all physics. Holtzman had probably come to the same results as Dreissig, but he did not publish everything, now Satoko understood why. Time and space unfolded, they were connected, they were both malleable!

The Furude were prescient even before the spice was a thing, even back on earth their prescience was there. It was that what allowed them to survive, then the proto-face dancer, a tiny person of unspecified gender, made an abomination on purpose so that it could operate an arm sized heighliner weapon. That technology remained with the Tleilaxu, they knew how it worked, Holtzmann reactors as small as they came. Yes a shield and a small laser could make a pocket sized fusion reactor. The Tleilaxu had the secret for cold fusion! Yet they chose to keep it to themselves, last time it was free for humans they were not prepared and brought down Arafel upon themselves.

Though Satoko had to focus on the now, this very facts were already known by Paul and subsequently his son and daughter. Two? Yes it has to be two of them. Rika was afraid of a Kwizats Haderach, and the only way for that to happen, if the Emperor was blind to her, was the son who saw her. It did not have any use to know this, they were meant to survive, they were meant to separate and branch off from humanity, this path was there for humans, but Paul was meant to force humanity upon that path, Rika willingly took it, proof of her prescience.

But there was the danger of Bernkastel taking the helm of the Golden Path, that couldn’t be, needless bloodshed would happen. Satoko launched towards Rika, she managed to dodge her friend, but Shion tackled her. Shion had come to help! Satoko held Rika’s head and touched her forehead with her own. Satoko’s memories poured in.

Satoko was there now, engulfing Bernkastel as a shadow, allowing Hanyuu to return to her place asides Rika. Bernkastel would remain as a threat yes, but now Satoko alone was there to hold her back. Rika opened her eyes and noticed the dark cave, the danger she had thought was now averted, Satoko did figure it out, Shion came to help. Yes their future was certain now.

They had no resistance; they could indeed take the empire. Why leave the planet when they could have their people all living as nobles? Rika could see time, she could find the miracles within her awareness, Satoko now understood the certainty of uncertainty, the way time and space were controlled to your own liking. Hanyuu was not a gift, she was a spy, the Tleilaxu had placed her there, they knew what hid in their genes, they knew how dangerous they truly were.

They had to move before Hanyuu was awakened by the Tleilaxu, the Emperor would soon be dead, Rika and Satoko both saw this, and they had to hurry.

The secret leader of the order

I

She was before a great tree, it moved as if it had flesh as parts of it, exposed flesh that oozed a red sap, every fruit known to men, and some lost to time dangling from the branches. She stood in a great garden, the leaves cracked when she moved, it had been ages since someone had set foot on that ground. She felt the insects walking happily around her feet, the  trees around them all bearing different fruits, from the tree’s sap one red river was  born, it  then divided into four currents, the trees around clearing the sap leaving it as water when it finally came out of the garden.

Even in this digested state said water fed earth’s rivers with life. The source of 8MS as a whole, the creator of life as we know it on earth, and of course its protector. The tree of life, in a world between worlds, where the small streams fed great rivers, the Ganges, the Amazon, the Yang Tze and of course the Nile spreading through earth feeding humans as a gift, a promise made by the tree eons ago. Seshat held her sandals on her left hand, she had taken them off before coming before the great tree.

A fruit dropped before Seshat, a golden fruit with a sweet smell. She bit into it, then could hear the tree inside of her mind. “Has our debugger succeeded?”

Seshat nodded, of course it had succeeded, it had even sealed its fate, its father too had complied fully knowing what would happen next “LD 2001 has complied too as well as her mate”

Seshat continued eating the fruit, she felt how it gave her strength

“I wish we could save them all, but shielding them too much will regress the species. Only now had that damage been done” The tree said with a sad voice. It had given humans fruits to make them powerful, to make them smarter, and they built great cities with that knowledge, two capitals, Lemuria and Atlantis, but said cities began relying on the tree for sustenance, hedonism took over their society. When the tree stopped feeding them their cities collapsed, Lemuria, located in Yucatan exploded causing a massive extinction event, Atlantis was less impressive, it did not go out with a bang but a wimper, it slowly declined until its society had completely forgotten about their wonders.

Just now had humans learned how to manipulate nature again, then war struck and killed most of them, then they learned how to control the tree’s own pollen, 8MS, the gift allowed them to survive, but it had to be taken away again. Gladly LD 2001 had planned accordingly and worked in said plan independently. Humans themselves knew that they were relying too much on it. The three of life, yes it had helped them, but if LD 2001 did not work with her servants to undo the human actions with its pollen, the tree would have turned it poisonous. There was no way of predicting that, but humans had passed the test.

Now it was all on the debugger, and it was working fine, the supervisors of the tree of life, the council of god, would see that their project was working. After all they had succeeded in producing more angels, LD prime, BC 00, Aurum, EUA, all of them products of said project, all of them far more powerful than the tree. Of course the tree was a God, an angel of ancient times, a Seraphim who had taken upon the task of working with the failed human project. Seshat was her acolyte, and both had seen it succeed. Though humanity was not stable, it would be the second time humans would die. Why were gods creating a species that could create things more powerful than them? Because the Gods believed in something greater, and feared it, and hope that one day they will produce something powerful enough to make themselves be noticed by the entity that has ignored them, that or actually creating said entity, to be proper angels, and serve a God, even if they had to work directly to create it.

Another fruit fell before Seshat, it was a  fruit she had already eaten, she knew it, the fruit of life, the peach of immortality, in legend even if you had offended the gods you could not die by their hand if you ate said peach. Of course immortality is an illusion, it just means you cannot die by common means, though this fruit made the one who consumed it so resistant to everything, that it made them virtually immortal for 10 thousand years. It had been less than that since Seshat had eaten the fruit, it was not for her.

Seshat took another bite, and another thought of the tree came into her mind “It is a failsafe, save whoever needs to be saved so our project does not fail”

“Is this allowed?” Sheshat said to the tree, then took another bite of her fruit

“There is no rule forbidding it, perhaps it will not be allowed after we do it”

Seshat nodded and took another bite “That’s all” The tree said, Seshat respectfully finished her fruit, and planted the seed on her way out. She took the fruit into her pocket, PH426, the most dangerous artifact of the tree of life. So this was their plan, have the debugger wipe humanity, and let Seshat save those who deserved to be saved. After all its promise after flooding the earth was that the next wave would be of fire. Only those who deserve to live would survive. What a terrible fate for humans, though this was the only way to spare them from the tree’s equal.

The face angel, the hand of destruction, it would come soon if everything they did had failed, only the fruit would be the salvation of humanity, though how many people could take a bite of a peach? How many bites does a peach have? Seshat, now out checked that very question in her mind, but no answer came, just recipes for peach pie. Perhaps she could take the juice out and feed a few drops to as many people as she could. That would work, but she had to see who drank said juice, one wrong person and the whole plan would fail.