Dune (61 page)

She found it within the drug she had swallowed.

The stuff was dancing particles within her, its motions so rapid that even frozen time could not stop them. Dancing particles. She began recognizing familiar structures, atomic linkages: a carbon atom here, helical wavering. . . a glucose molecule. An entire chain of molecules confronted her, and she recognized a protein. . . a methyl-protein configuration.

It was a soundless mental sigh within her as she saw the nature of the poison.

With her psychokinesthetic probing, she moved into it, shifted an oxygen mote, allowed another carbon mote to link, reattached a linkage of oxygen. . . hydrogen.

The change spread. . . faster and faster as the catalyzed reaction opened its surface of contact.

The suspension of time relaxed its hold upon her, and she sensed motion. The tube spout from the sack was touched to her mouth-gently, collecting a drop of moisture.

Chani's taking the catalyst from my body to change the poison in that sack,
Jessica thought.
Why?

Someone eased her to a sitting position. She saw the old Reverend Mother Ramallo being brought to sit beside her on the carpeted ledge. A dry hand touched her neck.

And there was another psychokinesthetic mote within her awareness! Jessica tried to reject it, but the mote swept closer. . . closer.

They touched!

It was like an ultimate
simpatico,
being two people at once: not telepathy, but mutual awareness.

But Jessica saw that the Reverend Mother didn't think of herself as old. An image unfolded before the mutual mind's eye: a young girl with a dancing spirit and tender humor.

Within the mutual awareness, the young girl said, “Yes, that is how I am.”

Jessica could only accept the words, not respond to them.

“You'll have it all soon, Jessica,” the inward image said.

This is
hallucination,
Jessica told herself.

“You know better than that,” the inward image said. “Swiftly now, do not fight me. There isn't much time. We. . . .” There came a long pause, then: “You should've told us you were pregnant!”

Jessica found the voice that talked within the mutual awareness. “Why?”

“This changes both of you! Holy Mother, what have we done?”

Jessica sensed a forced shift in the mutual awareness, saw another mote-presence with the inward eye. The other mote darted wildly here, there, circling. It radiated pure terror.

“You'll have to be strong,” the old Reverend Mother's image-presence said. “Be thankful it's a daughter you carry. This would've killed a male fetus. Now. . . carefully, gently. . . touch your daughter-presence. Be your daughter-presence. Absorb the fear. . . soothe. . . use your courage and your strength. . . gently now. . . gently. . . .”

The other whirling mote swept near, and Jessica compelled herself to touch it.

Terror threatened to overwhelm her.

She fought it the only way she knew:
“I shall not fear. Fear is the mind killer. . . . ”

The litany brought a semblance of calm. The other mote lay quiescent against her.

Words won't work,
Jessica told herself.

She reduced herself to basic emotional reactions, radiated love, comfort, a warm snuggling of protection.

The terror receded.

Again, the presence of the old Reverend Mother asserted itself, but now there was a tripling of mutual awareness—two active and one that lay quietly absorbing.

“Time compels me,” the Reverend Mother said within the awareness. “I have much to give you. And I do not know if your daughter can accept all this while remaining sane. But it must be: the needs of the tribe are paramount.”

“What—”

“Remain silent and accept!”

Experiences began to unroll before Jessica. It was like a lecture strip in a subliminal training projector at the Bene Gesserit school... but faster... blindingly faster.

Yet. . . distinct.

She knew each experience as it happened: there was a lover—virile, bearded, with the Fremen eyes, and Jessica saw his strength and tenderness, all of him in one blink-moment, through the Reverend Mother's memory.

There was no time now to think of what this might be doing to the daughter fetus, only time to accept and record. The experiences poured in on Jessica—birth, life, death—important matters and unimportant, an outpouring of single-view time.

Why should a fall of sand from a clifftop stick in the memory?
she asked herself.

Too late, Jessica saw what was happening: the old woman was dying and, in dying, pouring her experiences into Jessica's awareness as water is poured into a cup. The other mote faded back into pre-birth awareness as Jessica watched it. And, dying-in-conception, the old Reverend Mother left her life in Jessica's memory with one last sighing blur of words.

“I've been a long time waiting for you,” she said. “Here is my life.”

There it was, encapsuled, all of it.

Even the moment of death.

I am now a Reverend Mother,
Jessica realized.

And she knew with a generalized awareness that she had become, in truth, precisely what was meant by a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. The poison drug had transformed her.

This wasn't exactly how they did it at the Bene Gesserit school, she knew. No one had ever introduced her to the mysteries of it, but she knew.

The end result was the same.

Jessica sensed the daughter-mote still touching her inner awareness, probed it without response.

A terrible sense of loneliness crept through Jessica in the realization of what had happened to her. She saw her own life as a pattern that had slowed and all life around her speeded up so that the dancing interplay became clearer.

The sensation of mote-awareness faded slightly, its intensity easing as her body relaxed from the threat of the poison, but still she felt that
other
mote, touching it with a sense of guilt at what she had allowed to happen to it.

A tiny outflowing of love-comfort, like a reflection of what she had poured into it, came from the other mote.

Before Jessica could respond, she felt the adab presence of demanding memory. There was something that needed doing. She groped for it, realizing she was being impeded by a muzziness of the changed drug permeating her senses.

I could change that,
she thought.
I could take away the drug action and make it harmless.
But she sensed this would be an error.
I'm within a rite of joining.

Then she knew what she had to do.

Jessica opened her eyes, gestured to the watersack now being held above her by Chani.

“It has been blessed,” Jessica said. “Mingle the waters, let the change come to all, that the people may partake and share in the blessing.”

Still, the demanding memory worked on her, thrusting. There was another thing she had to do, she realized, but the drug made it difficult to focus.

“I have met the Reverend Mother Ramallo,” Jessica said. “She is gone, but she remains. Let her memory be honored in the rite.”

Now, where did I get those words?
Jessica wondered.

And she realized they came from another memory, the
life
that had been given to her and now was part of herself. Something about that gift felt incomplete, though.

“Let them have their orgy, ”
the other-memory said within her. “They've little enough pleasure out of living. Yes, and you and I need this little time to become acquainted before I recede and pour out through your memories. Already, I feel myself being tied to bits of you. Ah-h-h, you've a mind filled with interesting things. So many things I'd never imagined.”

And the memory-mind encapsulated within her opened itself to Jessica, permitting a view down a wide corridor to other Reverend Mothers until there seemed no end to them.

Jessica recoiled, fearing she would become lost in an ocean of oneness. Still, the corridor remained, revealing to Jessica that the Fremen culture was far older than she had suspected.

There had been Fremen on Poritrin, she saw, a people grown soft with an easy planet, fair game for Imperial raiders to harvest and plant human colonies on Bela Tegeuse and Salusa Secundus.

Oh, the wailing Jessica sensed in
that
parting.

Far down the corridor, an image-voice screamed: “They denied us the Hajj!”

Jessica saw the slave cribs on Bela Tegeuse down that inner corridor, saw the weeding out and the selecting that spread men to Rossak and Harmonthep. Scenes of brutal ferocity opened to her like the petals of a terrible flower. And she saw the thread of the past carried by Sayyadina after Sayyadina—first by word of mouth, hidden in the sand chanteys, then refined through their own Reverend Mothers with the discovery of the poison drug on Rossak ... and now developed to subtle strength on Arrakis in the discovery of the Water of Life.

Far down the inner corridor, another voice screamed: “Never to forgive! Never to forget!”

But Jessica's attention was focused on the revelation of the Water of Life, seeing its source: the liquid exhalation of a dying sandworm, a maker. And as she saw the killing of it in her new memory, she suppressed a gasp.

The creature was drowned!

“Mother, are you all right?”

Paul's voice intruded on her, and Jessica struggled out of the inner awareness to stare up at him, conscious of duty to him, but resenting his presence.

The thought hung in her mind, an enclosing awareness.

“Are you all right?” Paul repeated.

“Yes.”

“Is this all right for me to drink?” He gestured to the sack in Chani's hands. “They want me to drink it.”

She heard the hidden meaning in his words, realized he had detected the poison in the original, unchanged substance, that he was concerned for her. It occurred to Jessica then to wonder about the limits of Paul's prescience. His question revealed much to her.

“You may drink it,” she said. “It has been changed.” And she looked beyond him to see Stilgar staring down at her, the dark-dark eyes studying.

“Now, we know you cannot be false,” he said.

She sensed hidden meaning here, too, but the muzziness of the drug was overpowering her senses. How warm it was and soothing. How beneficent these Fremen to bring her into the fold of such companionship.

Paul saw the drug take hold of his mother.

He searched his memory—the fixed past, the flux-lines of the possible futures. It was like scanning through arrested instants of time, disconcerting to the lens of the inner eye. The fragments were difficult to understand when snatched out of the flux.

This drug—he could assemble knowledge about it, understand what it was doing to his mother, but the knowledge lacked a natural rhythm, lacked a system of mutual reflection.

He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future.

Things persisted in not being what they seemed.

“Drink it,” Chani said. She waved the hornspout of a watersack under his nose.

Paul straightened, staring at Chani. He felt carnival excitement in the air. He knew what would happen if he drank this spice drug with its quintessence of the substance that brought the change onto him. He would return to the vision of pure time, of time-become-space. It would perch him on the dizzying summit and defy him to understand.

From behind Chani, Stilgar said: “Drink it, lad. You delay the rite.”

Paul listened to the crowd then, hearing the wildness in their voices—“Lisan al-Gaib,” they said. “Muad'Dib!” He looked down at his mother. She appeared peacefully asleep in a sitting position—her breathing even and deep. A phrase out of the future that was his lonely past came into his mind:
“She sleeps in the Waters of Life. ”

Chani tugged at his sleeve.

Paul took the hornspout into his mouth, hearing the people shout. He felt the liquid gush into his throat as Chani pressed the sack, sensed giddiness in the fumes. Chani removed the spout, handed the sack into hands that reached for it from the floor of the cavern. His eyes focused on her arm, the green band of mourning there.

As she straightened, Chani saw the direction of his gaze, said: “I can mourn him even in the happiness of the waters. This was something he gave us.” She put her hand into his, pulling him along the ledge. “We are alike in a thing, Usul: We have each lost a father to the Harkonnens.”

Paul followed her. He felt that his head had been separated from his body and restored with odd connections. His legs were remote and rubbery.

They entered a narrow side passage, its walls dimly lighted by spaced-out glowglobes. Paul felt the drug beginning to have its unique effect on him, opening time like a flower. He found need to steady himself against Chani as they turned through another shadowed tunnel. The mixture of whipcord and softness he felt beneath her robe stirred his blood. The sensation mingled with the work of the drug, folding future and past into the present, leaving him the thinnest margin of trinocular focus.