"Frank Herbert - Dune 4 - God Emporer of Dune" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

Disbelieved and feared.
They had brought him down to the planet on a small Guild shuttle, arriving at
the dusk line with a green glimmer of sun corona along the horizon as they
dipped into the shadow. The spaceport had not looked at all like anything he
remembered.
It was larger and with a ring of strange buildings.
"Are you sure this is Dune'?" he had asked.
"Arrakis," his Tleilaxu escort had corrected him.
They had sped him in a sealed groundcar to this building somewhere within a city
they called Onn, giving the "n" sound a strange rising nasal inflection. The
room in which they left him was about three meters square, a cube really. There
was no sign of glowglobes, but the place was filled with warm yellow light.
I am a ghola, he told himself.
That had been a shock, but he had to believe it. To find himself living when he
knew he had died, that was proof enough. The Tleilaxu had taken cells from his
dead flesh and they had grown a bud in one of their axlotl tanks. That bud had
become this body in a process which had made him feel at first an alien in his
own flesh.
He looked down at the body. It was clothed in dark brown trousers and jacket of
a coarse weave which irritated his skin. Sandals protected his feet. Except for
the body, that was all they had given him, a parsimony which said something
about the real Tleilaxu character.
There was no furniture in the room. They had let him in through a single door
which had no handle on the inside. He looked up at the ceiling and around at the
walls, at the door. Despite the featureless character of the place, he felt that
he was being watched.
"Women of the Imperial Guard will come for you," they had said. Then they had
gone away, smiling slyly among themselves.
Women of the Imperial Guard?
The Tleilaxu escort had taken sadistic delight in exposing their shapechanging
abilities. He had not known from one minute to the next what new form the
plastic flow of their flesh would present.
Damned Face Dancers!
They had known all about him, of course, had known how much the Shape Changers
disgusted him.
What could he trust if it came from Face Dancers'? Very little. Could anything
they said be believed?
My name. I know my name.
And he had his memories. They had shocked the identity back into him. Gholas
were supposed to be incapable of recovering the original identity. But the
Tleilaxu had done it and
he was forced to believe because he understood how it had been done.
In the beginning, he knew, there had been the fully formed ghola, adult flesh
without name or memories-a palimpsest upon which the Tleilaxu could write almost
anything they wished.
"You are Ghola," they had said. That had been his only name for a long time.
Ghola had been taken like a malleable infant and conditioned to kill a
particular man-a man so like the original Paul Muad'Dib he had served and adored
that Idaho now suspected it might have been another ghola. But if that were
true, where had they obtained the original cells?