Dune

The workers hawked and spat into the gutter as they emerged into the night. Ridding themselves of some contaminant?

Burzmali put his mouth close to Lucilla’s ear and whispered: “Those workers are the Bordanos.”

She risked a glance back at them where they walked toward a side street. Bordanos? Ahhh, yes: people trained and bred to work the compression machinery that harnessed sewer gases. They had been bred to remove the sense of smell and the musculature of shoulders and arms had been increased. Burzmali guided her around a corner and out of sight of the Bordanos.

Five children emerged from a dark doorway beside them and wheeled into line following Lucilla and Burzmali. Lucilla noted their hands clutching small objects. They followed with a strange intensity. Abruptly, Burzmali stopped and turned. The children also stopped and stared at him. It was clear to Lucilla that the children were prepared for some violence.

Burzmali clasped both hands in front of him and bowed to the children. He said: “Guldur!”

When Burzmali resumed guiding her down the street, the children no longer followed.

“They would have stoned us,” he said.

“Why?”

“They are children of a sect that follows Guldur—the local name for the Tyrant.”

Lucilla looked back but the children were no longer in sight. They had set off in search of another victim.

Burzmali guided her around another corner. Now, they were in a street crowded with small merchants selling their wares from wheeled stands—food, clothing, small tools, and knives. A singsong of shouts filled the air as the merchants tried to attract buyers. Their voices had that end of the workday lift—a false brilliance composed of the hope that old dreams would be fulfilled, yet colored by the knowledge that life would not change for them. It occurred to Lucilla that the people of these streets pursued a fleeting dream, that the fulfillment they sought was not the thing itself but a myth they had been conditioned to seek the way racing animals were trained to chase after the whirling bait on the endless oval of the racetrack.

In the street directly ahead of them a burly figure in a thickly padded coat was engaged in loud-voiced argument with a merchant who offered a string bag filled with the dark red bulbs of a sweetly acid fruit. The fruit smell was thick all around them. The merchant complained: “You would steal the food from the mouths of my children!”

The bulky figure spoke in a piping voice, the accent chillingly familiar to Lucilla: “I, too, have children!”

Lucilla controlled herself with an effort.

When they were clear of the market street, she whispered to Burzmali: “That man in the heavy coat back there—a Tleilaxu Master!”

“Couldn’t be,” Burzmali protested. “Too tall.”

“Two of them, one on the shoulders of the other.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“I’ve seen others like that since we arrived, but I didn’t suspect.”

“Many searchers are in these streets,” she said.

Lucilla found that she did not much care for the everyday life of the gutter inhabitants on this gutter planet. She no longer trusted the explanation for bringing the ghola here. Of all those planets on which the precious ghola could have been raised, why had the Sisterhood chosen this one? Or was the ghola truly precious? Could it be that he was merely bait?

Almost blocking the narrow mouth of an alley beside them was a man plying a tall device of whirling lights.

“Live!” he shouted. “Live!”

Lucilla slowed her pace to watch a passerby step into the alleyway and pass a coin to the proprietor, then lean into a concave basin made brilliant by the lights. The proprietor stared back at Lucilla. She saw a man with a narrow dark face, the face of a Caladanian primitive on a body only slightly taller than that of a Tleilaxu Master. There had been a look of contempt on his brooding face as he took the customer’s money.

The customer lifted his face from the basin with a shudder and then left the alley, staggering slightly, his eyes glazed.

Lucilla recognized the device. Users called it a hypnobong and it was outlawed on all of the more civilized worlds.

Burzmali hurried her out of the view of the brooding hypnobong proprietor.

They came to a wider side street with a corner doorway set into the building across from them. Foot traffic all around; not a vehicle in sight. A tall man sat on the first step in the corner doorway, his knees drawn up close to his chin. His long arms were wrapped around his knees, the thin-fingered hands clasped tightly together. He wore a wide-brimmed black hat that shaded his face from the streetlights, but twin gleams from the shadows under that brim told Lucilla that this was no kind of human she had ever before encountered. This was something about which the Bene Gesserit had only speculated.

Burzmali waited until they were well away from the seated figure before satisfying her curiosity.

“Futar,” he whispered. “That’s what they call themselves. They’ve only recently been seen here on Gammu.”