Navigators of Dune

19

Since Manford’s cottage had been destroyed by cymeks, Anari found him an adequate and defensible replacement home, with rooms designed for Manford’s mobility whenever he walked on his hands. When she commandeered it, the owners were only too happy to surrender the dwelling to the Butlerian leader.

After night fell, Anari checked the perimeter of the house and then left Manford to rest and meditate. He remained alone in his new quarters with the few possessions that had been salvaged from the rubble of his destroyed residence. One of those rescued items was the small icon painting of Rayna Butler, chipped and scratched but still beautiful. He knew that the saintly woman’s spirit was watching over him. Rayna had given a young Manford his mission in life, had led him and trained him, and now he stared at her beautiful visage, her soul-filled eyes. After a moment of indecision, he turned the icon facedown. He could not let holy Rayna Butler see what he was about to do.

After listening to silence for a few moments, gathering his courage, Manford took out his most frightening possession, the laboratory journals of the evil robot Erasmus, which had been found on devastated Corrin eight decades ago.

Anari was afraid of the books and would have liked to burn them, but she didn’t dare defy Manford’s orders; he insisted on keeping them, studying them. Even if his loyal Swordmaster didn’t understand why, Manford needed to read the terrifying yet insightful writings for himself.

He was horrified, yet fascinated by the thoughts of the sadistic thinking machine and the descriptions of what he did in his documented experiments on human beings. As Manford read, he felt like a rodent caught in the hypnotic gaze of a serpent. Tortures, experiments, analysis — some appallingly wrong, yet many conclusions seemed frightening and apt.

In the quiet night after most of the residents of Empok had bedded down, Manford read the robot’s strange musings. Erasmus had coldly dissected and vivisected countless human beings without remorse. He considered every experiment to be necessary scientific research for his own understanding of mankind. For the independent robot, it had been an obsessive pursuit, with the ends justifying the means to attain them — though he had never fully succeeded. His target, his prey, was elusive and constantly outdistancing him.

Manford had already read these journals several times, and was sickened by them, but he was also convinced the difficult task was necessary so that he could understand the enemy’s twisted thought processes. It made Manford feel superior, even smug, to know that despite all of the robot’s research and all the pain he’d inflicted, Erasmus had never acquired even the most basic comprehension of the human soul.…