Dune (59 page)

Jamis killed another to win her,
Paul thought.

Paul said: “If I accept her as servant, may I yet change my mind at a later time?”

“You'd have a year to change your decision,” Stilgar said. “After that, she's a free woman to choose as she wishes . . . or you could free her to choose for herself at any time. But she's your responsibility, no matter what, for one year . . . and you'll always share some responsibility for the sons of Jamis.”

“I accept her as servant,” Paul said.

Harah stamped a foot, shook her shoulders with anger. “But I'm young!”

Stilgar looked at Paul, said: “Caution's a worthy trait in a man who'd lead.”

“But I'm young!” Harah repeated.

“Be silent,” Stilgar commanded. “If a thing has merit, it'll be. Show Usul to his quarters and see he has fresh clothing and a place to rest.”

“Oh-h-h-h!” she said.

Paul had registered enough of her to have a first approximation. He felt the impatience of the troop, knew many things were being delayed here. He wondered if he dared ask the whereabouts of his mother and Chani, saw from Stilgar's nervous stance that it would be a mistake.

He faced Harah, pitched his voice with tone and tremolo to accent her fear and awe, said: “Show me my quarters, Harah! We will discuss your youth another time.”

She backed away two steps, cast a frightened glance at Stilgar. “He has the weirding voice,” she husked.

“Stilgar,” Paul said. “Chani's father put heavy obligation on me. If there's anything. . . .”

“It'll be decided in council,” Stilgar said. “You can speak then.” He nodded in dismissal, turned away with the rest of the troop following him.

Paul took Harah's arm, noting how cool her flesh seemed, feeling her tremble. “I'll not harm you, Harah,” he said. “Show me our quarters.” And he smoothed his voice with relaxants.

“You'll not cast me out when the year's gone?” she said. “I know for true I'm not as young as once I was.”

“As long as I live you'll have a place with me,” he said. He released her arm. “Come now, where are our quarters?”

She turned, led the way down the passage, turning right into a wide cross tunnel lighted by evenly spaced yellow overhead globes. The stone floor was smooth, swept clean of sand.

Paul moved up beside her, studied the aquiline profile as they walked. “You do not hate me, Harah?”

“Why should I hate you?”

She nodded to a cluster of children who stared at them from the raised ledge of a side passage. Paul glimpsed adult shapes behind the children partly hidden by filmy hangings.

“I... bested Jamis.”

“Stilgar said the ceremony was held and you're a friend of Jamis.” She glanced sidelong at him. “Stilgar said you gave moisture to the dead. Is that truth?”

“Yes.”

“It's more than I'll do . . . can do.”

“Don't you mourn him?”

“In the time of mourning, I'll mourn him.”

They passed an arched opening. Paul looked through it at men and women working with stand-mounted machinery in a large, bright chamber. There seemed an extra tempo of urgency to them.

“What're they doing in there?” Paul asked.

She glanced back as they passed beyond the arch, said: “They hurry to finish the quota in the plastics shop before we flee. We need many dew collectors for the planting.”

“Flee?”

“Until the butchers stop hunting us or are driven from our land.” Paul caught himself in a stumble, sensing an arrested instant of time, remembering a fragment, a visual projection of prescience—but it was displaced, like a montage in motion. The bits of his prescient memory were not quite as he remembered them.

“The Sardaukar hunt us,” he said.

“They'll not find much excepting an empty sietch or two,” she said. “And they'll find their share of death in the sand.”

“They'll find this place?” he asked.

“Likely.”

“Yet we take the time to. . . .” He motioned with his head toward the arch now far behind them. “. . . make . . . dew collectors?”

“The planting goes on.”

“What're dew collectors?” he asked.

The glance she turned on him was full of surprise. “Don't they teach you anything in the . . wherever it is you come from?”

“Not about dew collectors.”

“Hai!” she said, and there was a whole conversation in the one word.

“Well, what are they?”

“Each bush, each weed you see out there in the erg,” she said, “how do you suppose it lives when we leave it? Each is planted most tenderly in its own little pit. The pits are filled with smooth ovals of chromoplastic. Light turns them white. You can see them glistening in the dawn if you look down from a high place. White reflects. But when Old Father Sun departs, the chromoplastic reverts to transparency in the dark. It cools with extreme rapidity. The surface condenses moisture out of the air. That moisture trickles down to keep our plants alive.”

“Dew collectors,” he muttered, enchanted by the simple beauty of such a scheme.

“I'll mourn Jamis in the proper time for it,” she said, as though her mind had not left his other question. “He was a good man, Jamis, but quick to anger. A good provider, Jamis, and a wonder with the children. He made no separation between Geoff's boy, my firstborn, and his own true son. They were equal in his eyes.” She turned a questing stare on Paul. “Would it be that way with you, Usul?”

“We don't have that problem.”

“But if—”

“Harah!”

She recoiled at the harsh edge in his voice.

They passed another brightly lighted room visible through an arch on their left. “What's made there?” he asked.

“They repair the weaving machinery,” she said. “But it must be dismantled by tonight. ” She gestured at a tunnel branching to their left. “Through there and beyond, that's food processing and stillsuit maintenance.” She looked at Paul. “Your suit looks new. But if it needs work, I'm good with suits. I work in the factory in season.”

They began coming on knots of people now and thicker clusterings of openings in the tunnel's sides. A file of men and women passed them carrying packs that gurgled heavily, the smell of spice strong about them.

“They'll not get our water,” Harah said. “Or our spice. You can be sure of that.”

Paul glanced at the openings in the tunnel walls, seeing the heavy carpets on the raised ledge, glimpses of rooms with bright fabrics on the walls, piled cushions. People in the openings fell silent at their approach, followed Paul with untamed stares.

“The people find it strange you bested Jamis,” Harah said. “Likely you'll have some proving to do when we're settled in a new sietch.”

“I don't like killing,” he said.

“Thus Stilgar tells it,” she said, but her voice betrayed her disbelief.

A shrill chanting grew louder ahead of them. They came to another side opening wider than any of the others Paul had seen. He slowed his pace, staring in at a room crowded with children sitting cross-legged on a maroon-carpeted floor.

At a chalkboard against the far wall stood a woman in a yellow wraparound, a projecto-stylus in one hand. The board was filled with designs—circles, wedges and curves, snake tracks and squares, flowing arcs split by parallel lines. The woman pointed to the designs one after the other as fast as she could move the stylus, and the children chanted in rhythm with her moving hand.

Paul listened, hearing the voices grow dimmer behind as he moved deeper into the sietch with Harah.

“Tree,” the children chanted. “Tree, grass, dune, wind, mountain, hill, fire, lightning, rock, rocks, dust, sand, heat, shelter, heat, full, winter, cold, empty, erosion, summer, cavern, day, tension, moon, night, caprock, sandtide, slope, planting, binder. . . .”

“You conduct classes at a time like this?” Paul asked.

Her face went somber and grief edged her voice: “What Liet taught us, we cannot pause an instant in that. Liet who is dead must not be forgotten. It's the Chakobsa way.”

She crossed the tunnel to the left, stepped up onto a ledge, parted gauzy orange hangings and stood aside: “Your yali is ready for you, Usul.”

Paul hesitated before joining her on the ledge. He felt a sudden reluctance to be alone with this woman. It came to him that he was surrounded by a way of life that could only be understood by postulating an ecology of ideas and values. He felt that this Fremen world was fishing for him, trying to snare him in its ways. And he knew what lay in that snare—the wild jihad, the religious war he felt he should avoid at any cost.

“This is your yali,” Harah said. “Why do you hesitate?”

Paul nodded, joined her on the ledge. He lifted the hangings across from her, feeling metal fibers in the fabric, followed her into a short entrance way and then into a larger room, square, about six meters to a side—thick blue carpets on the floor, blue and green fabrics hiding the rock walls, glowglobes tuned to yellow overhead bobbing against draped yellow ceiling fabrics.

The effect was that of an ancient tent.

Harah stood in front of him, left hand on hip, her eyes studying his face. “The children are with a friend,” she said. “They will present themselves later.”

Paul masked his unease beneath a quick scanning of the room. Thin hangings to the right, he saw, partly concealed a larger room with cushions piled around the walls. He felt a soft breeze from an air duct, saw the outlet cunningly hidden in a pattern of hangings directly ahead of him.

“Do you wish me to help you remove your stillsuit?” Harah asked.

“No . . . thank you.”

“Shall I bring food?”

“Yes.”

“There is a reclamation chamber off the other room.” She gestured. “For your comfort and convenience when you're out of your stillsuit.”

“You said we have to leave this sietch,” Paul said. “Shouldn't we be packing or something?”

“It will be done in its time,” she said. “The butchers have yet to penetrate to our region.”

Still she hesitated, staring at him.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“You've not the eyes of the Ibad,” she said. “It's strange but not entirely unattractive.”

“Get the food,” he said. “I'm hungry.”

She smiled at him—a knowing, woman's smile that he found disquieting. “I am your servant,” she said, and whirled away in one lithe motion, ducking behind a heavy wall hanging that revealed another passage before falling back into place.

Feeling angry with himself, Paul brushed through the thin hanging on the right and into the larger room. He stood there a moment caught by uncertainty. And he wondered where Chani was... Chani who had just lost her father.

We're alike in that,
he thought.

A wailing cry sounded from the outer corridors, its volume muffled by the intervening hangings. It was repeated, a bit more distant. And again. Paul realized someone was calling the time. He focused on the fact that he had seen no clocks.

The faint smell of burning creosote bush came to his nostrils, riding on the omnipresent stink of the sietch. Paul saw that he had already suppressed the odorous assault on his senses.

And he wondered again about his mother, how the moving montage of the future would incorporate her. . . and the daughter she bore. Mutable time-awareness danced around him. He shook his head sharply, focusing his attention on the evidences that spoke of profound depth and breadth in this Fremen culture that had swallowed them.

With its subtle oddities.

He had seen a thing about the caverns and this room, a thing that suggested far greater differences than anything he had yet encountered.

There was no sign of a poison snooper here, no indication of their use anywhere in the cave warren. Yet he could smell poisons in the sietch stench—strong ones, common ones.

He heard a rustle of hangings, thought it was Harah returning with food, and turned to watch her. Instead, from beneath a displaced pattern of hangings, he saw two young boys—perhaps aged nine and ten—staring out at him with greedy eyes. Each wore a small kindjal-type of crysknife, rested a hand on the hilt.

And Paul recalled the stories of the Fremen—that their children fought as ferociously as the adults.

The hands move, the lips move
—
Ideas gush from his words,
And his eyes devour!
He is an island of Selfdom.

—
description from “A Manual of Muad'Dib” by the Princess Irulan

 

PHOSPHORTUBES IN the faraway upper reaches of the cavern cast a dim light onto the thronged interior, hinting at the great size of this rock-enclosed. space... larger, Jessica saw, than even the Gathering Hall of her Bene Gesserit school. She estimated there were more than five thousand people gathered out there beneath the ledge where she stood with Stilgar.

And more were coming.

The air was murmurous with people.

“Your son has been summoned from his rest, Sayyadina,” Stilgar said. “Do you wish him to share in your decision?”

“Could he change my decision?”

“Certainly, the air with which you speak comes from your own lungs, but—”

“The decision stands,” she said.

But she felt misgivings, wondering if she should use Paul as an excuse for backing out of a dangerous course. There was an unborn daughter to think of as well. What endangered the flesh of the mother endangered the flesh of the daughter.