Dune: The Butlerian Jihad (64 page)

Heedless of her own danger, Serena ripped her arms free at the cost of torn skin and hurled herself against the sentinel robot, shoving the machine into the high balcony rail. When the sentinel righted itself, she pushed again, harder this time. The robot struck the low barrier, broke through the balustrade, and tumbled into open air.

Paying no attention to the falling machine, Serena lunged at Erasmus and pounded him with her fists. She tried to dent or claw his smooth flowmetal face, but succeeded only in bloodying her fingers and breaking her nails. In her mindless frenzy, Serena tore his lovely new robe. Then she grabbed a small terra-cotta urn from the balcony edge and smashed it against Erasmus’s body.

“Stop behaving like an animal,” Erasmus said. With a casual blow, the robot knocked her aside, sending her sobbing and crumbling to the tile floor.

SUPERVISING THE WORK crew in Erasmus’s plaza, Iblis Ginjo watched the scene in utter disbelief. “It is Serena!” one of the villa workers cried, recognizing her on the high balcony. Her name was taken up by the other workers, as if they revered her. Iblis remembered Serena Butler from when he had processed her with new slaves arriving from Giedi Prime.

Then the robot dropped the baby.

Unconcerned with consequences, Iblis rushed across the plaza in a desperate but fruitless attempt to catch the child. Seeing the trustee’s brave reaction, many of the slaves also surged forward.

Standing over the broken, bloodied child on the pavement, Iblis knew he could not help in any way. Even after all the atrocities he had seen cymeks and thinking machines commit, this one outrage seemed inconceivable. He gathered the broken little body in his arms and looked up.

Now, remarkably, Serena was fighting her masters. The workers gasped and drew back as she pushed a sentinel robot off the balcony. In a flash of metal, the thinking machine plummeted four stories to slam into the hard flagstones, not far from the bloodstain left by the dead child. With a sound like a sledge hitting an anvil, the sentinel robot smashed, bent, and crumpled. It lay in a motionless heap on the ground, its fibrous and metallic components broken, gelcircuitry fluid oozing out into the cracks. . . .

Mortified and appalled, the slaves stared at what had happened.
Like tinder ready for a spark
, Iblis thought. A human captive had fought the machines! She had destroyed a robot with her own hands! Amazed, they called out her name.

Above on the balcony, a defiant Serena continued to shriek at Erasmus, while he shoved her back with his superior strength. The woman’s passionate courage astounded all of them.
Could the message be any clearer?

An ugly shout of anger rose from the captive workers. They had already been primed by months of Iblis’s instructions and subtle manipulations. Now it was time.

With a smile of grim satisfaction, he bellowed his call. And the rebels surged forward in an act that would be remembered for ten thousand years.

W
hen the Armada battle group left Poritrin, the crowds in Starda were much diminished, the cheering more subdued. Word had circulated quickly about the slaves who had bungled a vital job. It was a shame upon the entire world.

Deeply disappointed, Niko Bludd watched the ion trails of the departing battle group. Then, focusing his wrath, he floated his ceremonial platform over the gathered slave crews. He had commanded their chastised overseers to muster all workers for inspection.

Lord Bludd spoke into a voice projector that thundered down upon the grumbling slaves. “You have let Poritrin down! You all have disgraced humanity. Your sabotage has hindered the war effort against our enemies. This is
treason
!”

He glared at them, hoping for some sign of remorse, abject pleas for forgiveness, even heads bowed in guilt. Instead, the captives seemed defiant, as if proud of what they had done. Since slaves were not citizens of the League, they could not technically be guilty of treason, but he liked the weighty, ominous sound of the word. These ignorant people would not understand the subtle difference.

He sniffed, recalling an old Navachristian punishment, intended as a nonviolent psychological blow. “I declare a Day of Shame upon all of you. Be thankful that Segundo Harkonnen detected your incompetence before brave lives were lost. But your actions will hurt our continuing struggle against Omnius. Blood cannot be cleansed from your hands.”

Knowing they were a superstitious lot, he shouted a curse at them. “May this shame fall upon all your descendants! May Buddislamic cowards never be free of their debt to humanity!”

Raging and shouting, he ordered the Dragoon guards to steer the platform away from the spaceport.

BEL MOULAY HAD been hoping for a volatile situation such as this. Never again would there be so many slaves massed together at one time. The Zenshiite leader called his brothers to action.

The overseers and Dragoon guards had orders to break up the reassigned crews and return the slave laborers to their original masters. Much of Poritrin’s routine work had gone undone while the Armada ships were in drydock at the spaceport, and a number of lords had expressed their impatience for life to return to normal.

But now the captives refused to move, refused to work.

Bel Moulay shouted to those close enough to hear his words, awakening seeds he had planted during secret talks, month after month. He spoke in Galach so that all of the nobles could understand him. “We do not toil for slavers! What difference is it to us if the thinking machines oppress us, or you?” He raised a fist. “God knows we are justified! We will never give up the fight!”

A howl rose in vibrating unison. The pent-up rage spread like fire over oil, faster than the Dragoon guards or the Poritrin nobles could react.

Moulay shouted toward the nobleman’s departing platform. “Niko Bludd, you are worse than the thinking machines
because you enslave your own kind
!”

A throng of Zenshiites and Zensunnis suddenly surrounded the astonished supervisors and disarmed them. One overseer with a black bandanna around his slick scalp held up his fists and gruffly shouted commands, but didn’t know what to do when the slaves ignored his orders. The insurgent workers clutched the man’s sleeves, tugged at his gray work gown, and dragged him back to his own holding pens, where so many of their unfortunate companions had been held after the deadly fever.

Bel Moulay had instructed the slaves in how to be the most effective. They must take hostages, not turn into a mob and slaughter the nobles outright. Only in this manner would the people have any hope of negotiating their freedom.

The bearded Zenshiite leader identified several unmanned equipment shacks and four old boats that had run aground on the low-tide mudflats; his followers set them afire. The flames rose skyward like orange flowers, spreading their smokey pollen above the spaceport. Slaves, suddenly unrestrained, poured out onto the landing grids, where they set up obstructions that prevented any commercial vessels from landing.

Some young insurgents broke through the outer cordon of astonished spectators. Flustered Dragoons overreacted and opened fire, dropping several in their tracks, but the rest of the excited slaves raced into the streets of Starda, disappearing like fish into the reeds. They ran into alleyways, hopping across floating barges and metal-roofed warehouses, where they rendezvoused with other slave children who had been waiting for this opportunity.

The breathless children passed their news in the ancient Chakobsa hunting language that every one of these repressed people could understand. And the uprising spread. . . .

TIO HOLTZMAN WAS upset and confused, ashamed that the first large-scale military deployment of his innovative shields had been such an embarrassing debacle. Preoccupied while Norma Cenva worked on her own designs, he didn’t notice for some time that his regular meal had not arrived, that his pot of clove tea had grown cold. Stymied by a complex integral, he gave up in disgust.

The house and laboratories seemed oddly silent.

Frustrated, he rang for servants, then returned to his work. Minutes later, hearing no response from the household slaves, he rang again, then bellowed into the corridors. When he saw a Zenshiite woman walking down the hall, he shouted for her. She simply looked at him with a peculiar expression and turned indignantly in the opposite direction.

He couldn’t believe it.

After he rounded up Norma, the two of them entered the room full of equation solvers. There, they found the slaves simply chatting in their own language, papers and calculation devices lying untouched in front of them.

Holtzman thundered at them, “Why don’t you finish your assignments? We have designs to complete— important work!”

As one, the solvers swept everything off the tables. Equipment clattered to the floor and papers fluttered like pigeons’ wings.

The Savant was flabbergasted. Beside him, the childlike Norma seemed to understand better than he did.

Holtzman called for the household guards, but only one responded, a sweating sergeant who clung to his weapons as if they were anchors. “My apologies, Savant Holtzman. The other Dragoons have been summoned by Lord Bludd to quell the disturbance at the spaceport.”

Holtzman and Norma hurried to the viewing platform, where they peered through a magnification scope at fires burning around the spaceport. Large numbers of people were gathered there, and even at this distance the Savant could hear crowd noises.

When their master’s back was turned, one solver shouted, “We have been slaves long enough! We will not work for you anymore!”

Holtzman spun around, but could not identify the speaker. “Are you fools as well as slaves? Do you think
I
recline on a divan while you all work? Have you not seen the glowglobes in my office shining into the night? This stoppage hurts
all
of humanity.”

Norma tried to sound reasonable. “We feed and clothe you, provide decent shelter— and the only thing we ask in return is assistance with simple mathematics. We must fight against our common enemy.”

Holtzman interjected, “Yes, would you rather be back on your smelly little uncivilized worlds?”

“Yes!” the slaves shouted, in unison.

“Selfish idiots,” he muttered, and looked out the window again at the fires and milling slaves. “Unbelievable!” He didn’t consider himself a bad master. He worked these people no harder than he worked himself.

From the viewing platform where Holtzman and Norma stood, the river appeared a particularly dismal gray, reflecting the color of thick overhanging clouds. Norma speculated, “If this uprising spreads to the agricultural fields and mines, Lord Bludd’s military forces may not be able to contain it.”

Holtzman shook his head. “Those arrogant Buddislamics think only of themselves, just as they did when they fled from the Titans. Never able to see beyond their own narrow horizon.” He shot a final glare at the room full of indignant solvers. “Now you and I will be forced to waste time dealing with people such as these, instead of our real enemies.” He spat on the floor, thinking of no other way to show his disgust. “It’ll be a wonder if any of us survive.”

He ordered the room of solvers sealed and further rations denied until they returned to work. Uneasy, Norma trotted along behind him.

THAT AFTERNOON, LORD Bludd received a list of demands from the leader of the insurrection. Protected by his followers, Bel Moulay issued a statement, demanding the release of all enslaved Zenshiites and Zensunnis from bondage, and safe passage back to their homeworlds.

At the beseiged spaceport, the rebels were keeping many nobles and overseers hostage. Buildings burned, while Bel Moulay delivered impassioned speeches from the heart of the mob, fanning the flames. . . .

T
iming was everything. For months, Iblis had primed his work crews and awaited the promised signal that would launch a violent, coordinated revolt. But something else had intervened, an event of staggering proportions. The slaughter of a human child by a machine, and the incredible sight of his mother fighting back— and destroying a robot!

Using this horrific crime as a springboard, Iblis hardly needed his innate abilities of persuasion. Around him he heard shouts, breaking glass, running feet. The angry slave workers required no manipulation— they
wanted
to do this.

The rebellion on Earth blossomed and gained violent strength in the precinct of Erasmus’s villa. Three men toppled an eagle statue from the nearest alcove; others tipped over the crown of a stone fountain in the plaza. The mob tore down vines from the sides of the main building, smashed windows. They broke through the foyer, swarming over two confused sentinel robots who had never seen such a response from the supposedly cowed prisoners. Ripping the heavy weapon arms off the destroyed robots, the people lugged them along, indiscriminately opening fire.

The rebellion must spread
.

Iblis feared that if the disturbance remained too localized, Omnius’s sentries would come and exterminate everyone. But if he could contact his other groups and send out the signal, the revolt would continue to build, spreading from settlement to settlement. Hopefully the Cogitor and his secondary had managed to assist the secret plans.

Now that the mob had been launched here at Erasmus’s villa, the real work of the insurrection must occur elsewhere. Watching the frenzy increase around him, hearing the shouts grow louder, seeing the wild destruction, Iblis decided that these people no longer needed him.

With the capital city grid illuminated by a ghostly yellow moon, Iblis issued the much-anticipated command to his core groups at other major sites. He notified the unit leaders, who in turn sent men and women surging into the streets, carrying clubs, heavy tools, cutters, any weapon that might be effective against the thinking machines.