Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson Read Free Book Online Page A

It’s well within your talents. In fact, you can keep his water as the price of your service.”
    Now Ishanti smiled enough to show teeth, and she partially drew the milky-white dagger at her waist. “Thank you, sir.” She placed the gag back on the captive’s mouth, muffling his protestations, and led the struggling man away.

 
    It will never be possible to explain my motives to anyone, with the exception of Erasmus. We understand each other, despite our obvious differences.
    — GILBERTUS ALBANS , private journal notes
    To encourage Mentat concentration, Headmaster Gilbertus Albans had built his school on the least populated continent of Lampadas. Though this was already a pastoral world, he needed a place where his instructors and students could focus on the demanding curriculum and not be distracted by external concerns.
    When choosing this world as the home of his Mentat School, he had erred by underestimating the continued strength of the Butlerian movement after the defeat of Omnius. The antitechnology fervor should have waned quickly, sputtering out through lack of passion and need, but Manford Torondo was more powerful than ever. Gilbertus had to walk a fine line.
    In the main instruction theater he stood on the stage, the focus of attention. The seats encircled him and rose steeply up to the rear. The amphitheater’s surrounding walls and ceiling were of dark, stained wood, with an artificial patina that made them look very old, with a weight of importance. Clever amplifiers carried his calm, reserved voice to all of his attentive students.
    “You must look past initial appearances.” The Headmaster gestured down to the two bodies that rested on autopsy slabs at the center of the stage. One table held a pale, naked human cadaver, head upturned and eyes closed; the dead man’s arms were extended straight at the sides. On the other table lay a deactivated combat mek, its fierce weapon arms and bullet-shaped head positioned in a similar arrangement.
    “A human and a thinking machine. Note the parallels. Study them. Learn from them, and ask yourselves: Are they really so different after all?”
    Gilbertus wore a tweedy waistcoat and trousers, and round spectacles on his narrow face, because he preferred these to medical treatments that could have improved his eyesight. His hair was thin but still the natural straw-yellow of his youth. He had to keep up appearances, and took great care to hide the fact that he was more than 180 years old now, thanks to the life-extension treatment he’d received from the independent robot Erasmus. Not a single one of the Mentat students suspected how important the machine mentor had been in his life; it would be dangerous if the Butlerians were to discover the truth about Gilbertus’s past.
    “The Jihad proved that humans are superior to thinking machines, true. But upon closer inspection, one can see the similarities.”
    Because Mentats were the human answer to computers, the antitechnology Butlerians supported his school. Gilbertus, however, had entirely different experiences with the thinking machines. He kept his opinions to himself for his own safety, especially here on Lampadas.
    Gilbertus lifted the smooth head of the combat mek and disengaged it from the neck anchor mechanism. “The robot you see here is a remnant of that conflict, and we received special dispensation to use it as a teaching tool.” (The Imperial government had posed no problems, but Manford Torondo had not been so easily convinced.)
    He lifted the cadaver’s pale right arm. “Note the musculature, compare it to the mechanical anatomy of the combat robot.”
    As the silent students watched, some intrigued and some displaying obvious horror, Gilbertus methodically removed organs from the prepped cadaver, then took out the roughly equivalent parts from the combat mek, step by step, showing the parallels. He displayed all the parts on trays next to each body, performing the autopsies