Herbert, Frank – Dune 6 – Children of the Mind

But didn’t the master of these bodies leap somewhere? Where did he go, when he fled from me? Now he was back, now he was restoring peace and calm in the bodies that she had momentarily mastered, but where had he gone?

She found it, a set of links far different from the mechanical bindings of the ansible. Where the ansibles might seem to be cables, metal, hard, the web that now she found was lacy and light; but against all appearances it was also strong and copious. She could leap here, yes, and so she leapt.

Suddenly Valentine was as still as a corpse. “She’s dead,” whispered Ela.

“No!” wailed Miro, and he tried to breathe life into her mouth until the woman under his hands, under his lips, began to stir. She breathed deeply on her own. Her eyes fluttered open.

“Miro,” she said. And then she wept and wept and wept and clung to him.

Ender lay still on the floor. The women untangled themselves from him, helping each other to rise to their knees, to stand, to bend, to lift him up, to get his bruised body back onto the bed. Then they looked at each other: Valentine with a bleeding lip, Plikt with Ender’s scratches on her face, Novinha with a battered, blackening eye.

“I had a husband once who beat me,” said Novinha.

“That wasn’t Ender who fought us,” said Plikt.

“It’s Ender now,” said Valentine.

On the bed, he opened up his eyes. Did he see them? How could they know?

“Ender,” Novinha said, and began to weep. “Ender, you don’t have to stay for my sake anymore.” But if he heard her he betrayed no sign of it.

The Samoan men let go of him, for Peter no longer twitched. His face fell open-mouthed into the sand where he had vomited. Wang-mu again was beside him, using her own clothing to gently wipe away the sand and muck from his face, from his eyes especially. In moments a bowl of pure water was beside her, put there by someone’s hands, she did not see whose, or care either, for her only thought was Peter, to cleanse him. He breathed shallowly, rapidly, but gradually he calmed and finally opened up his eyes.

“I dreamed the strangest dream,” he said.

“Hush,” she answered him.

“A terrible bright dragon chased me breathing fire, and I ran through the corridors, searching for a hiding place, an escape, a protector.”

Malu’s voice rumbled like the sea: “There is no hiding from a god.”

Peter spoke again as if he hadn’t heard the holy man. “Wang-mu,” he said, “at last I found my hiding place.” His hand reached up and touched her cheek, and his eyes looked into her eyes with a kind of wonder.

“Not me,” she said. “I am not strong enough to stand against her.”

He answered her: “I know. But are you strong enough to stand with me?”

Jane raced along the lacework of the links among the trees. Some of the trees were mighty ones, and some weaker, some so faint that she could have blown them away with only a breath it seemed, but as she saw them all recoil from her in fear, she knew that fear herself and she backed away, pushed no one from his place. Sometimes the lacework thickened and toughened and led away toward something fiercely bright, as bright as she was. These places were familiar to her, an ancient memory but she knew the path; it was into such a web that she had first leapt into life, and like the primal memory of birth it all came back to her, memory long lost and forgotten: I know the queens who rule at the knotting of these sturdy ropes. Of all the aiъas she had touched in these few minutes since her death, these were the strongest ones by far, each one of them at least a match for her. When hive queens make their web to call and catch a queen, it is only the mightiest and most ambitious ones who can take the place that they prepare. Only a few aiъas have the capacity to rule over thousands of consciousnesses, to master other organisms as thoroughly as humans and pequeninos master the cells of their own bodies. Oh, perhaps these hive queens were not all as capable as she, perhaps not even as hungry to grow as Jane’s aiъa was, but they were stronger than any human or pequenino, and unlike them they saw her clearly and knew what she was and all that she could do and they were ready. They loved her and wanted her to thrive; they were sisters and mothers to her, truly; but their places were full and they had no room for her. So from those ropes and knots she turned away, back to the lacier twinings of the pequeninos, to the strong trees that nevertheless recoiled from her because they knew that she was the stronger one.

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