Dune (68 page)

Harah rubbed at her eyes, smiled reassuringly at Alia. Yet there was a look of wildness in the eyes of the Fremen woman, an intensity as though they, too, were trying to hear Alia's words.

And Jessica thought:
What do we really know of how such a one thinks ... out of her unique experiences and training and ancestry?

“Just when I felt safe and reassured,” Alia said, “there was another spark with us ... and everything was happening at once. The other spark was the old Reverend Mother. She was ... trading lives with my mother ... everything ... and I was there with them, seeing it all ... everything. And it was over, and I was them and all the others and myself ... only it took me a long time to find myself again. There were so many others.”

“It was a cruel thing,” Jessica said. “No being should wake into consciousness thus. The wonder of it is you could accept all that happened to you.”

“I couldn't do anything else!” Alia said. “I didn't know how to reject or hide my consciousness ... or shut it off ... everything just happened ... everything ....”

“We didn't know,” Harah murmured. “When we gave your mother the Water to change, we didn't know you existed within her.”

“Don't be sad about it, Harah,” Alia said. “I shouldn't feel sorry for myself. After all, there's cause for happiness here: I'm a Reverend Mother. The tribe has two Rev ....”

She broke off, tipping her head to listen.

Harah rocked back on her heels against the sitting cushion, stared at Alia, bringing her attention then up to Jessica's face.

“Didn't you suspect?” Jessica asked.

“Sh-h-h-h,” Alia said.

A distant rhythmic chanting came to them through the hangings that separated them from the sietch corridors. It grew louder, carrying distinct sounds now: “Ya!Ya! Yawm! Ya! Ya! Yawm! Mu zein, wallah! Ya! Ya! Yawm! Mu zein, Wallah!”

The chanters passed the outer entrance, and their voices boomed through to the inner apartments. Slowly the sound receded.

When the sound had dimmed sufficiently, Jessica began the ritual, the sadness in her voice: “It was Ramadhan and April on Bela Tegeuse.”

“My family sat in their pool courtyard,” Harah said, “in air bathed by the moisture that arose from the spray of a fountain. There was a tree of portyguls, round and deep in color, near at hand. There was a basket with mish mish and baklawa and mugs of liban—all manner of good things to eat. In our gardens and in our flocks, there was peace ... peace in all the land.”

“Life was full with happiness until the raiders came,” Alia said.

“Blood ran cold at the scream of friends,” Jessica said. And she felt the memories rushing through her out of all those other pasts she shared.

“La, la, la, the women cried,” said Harah.

“The raiders came through the mushtamal, rushing at us with their knives dripping red from the lives of our men,” Jessica said.

Silence came over the three of them as it was in all the apartments of the sietch, the silence while they remembered and kept their grief thus fresh.

Presently, Harah uttered the ritual ending to the ceremony, giving the words a harshness that Jessica had never before heard in them.

“We will never forgive and we will never forget,” Harah said.

In the thoughtful quiet that followed her words, they heard a muttering of people, the swish of many robes. Jessica sensed someone standing beyond the hangings that shielded her chamber.

“Reverend Mother?”

A woman's voice, and Jessica recognized it: the voice of Tharthar, one of Stilgar's wives.

“What is it, Tharthar?”

“There is trouble, Reverend Mother.”

Jessica felt a constriction at her heart, an abrupt fear for Paul. “Paul ...” she gasped.

Tharthar spread the hangings, stepped into the chamber. Jessica glimpsed a press of people in the outer room before the hangings fell. She looked up at Tharthar—a small, dark woman in a red-figured robe of black, the total blue of her eyes trained fixedly on Jessica, the nostrils of her tiny nose dilated to reveal the plug scars.

“What is it?” Jessica demanded.

“There is word from the sand,” Tharthar said. “Usul meets the maker for his test . . . it is today. The young men say he cannot fail, he will be a sandrider by nightfall. The young men are banding for a razzia. They will raid in the north and meet Usul there. They say they will raise the cry then. They say they will force him to call out Stilgar and assume command of the tribes.”

Tharthar shifted from one foot to the other, cleared her throat.

We know the need for cautious waiting,
Jessica thought,
but there's the core of our frustration. We know also the harm that waiting extended too long can do us. We lose our senses of purpose if the waiting's prolonged.

“The young men say if Usul does not call out Stilgar, then he must be afraid,” Tharthar said.

She lowered her gaze.

“So that's the way of it,” Jessica muttered. And she thought:
Well
I
saw it coming. As did Stilgar.

Again, Tharthar cleared her throat. “Even my brother, Shoab, says it,” she said. “They will leave Usul no choice.”

Then it has come,
Jessica thought.
And Paul will have to handle it himself. The Reverend Mother dare not become involved in the succession.

Alia freed her hand from her mother's, said: “I will go with Tharthar and listen to the young men. Perhaps there is a way.”

Jessica met Tharthar's gaze, but spoke to Alia: “Go, then. And report to me as soon as you can.”

“We do not want this thing to happen, Reverend Mother,” Tharthar said.

“We do not want it,” Jessica agreed. “The tribe needs
all
its strength.” She glanced at Harah. “Will you go with them?”

Harah answered the unspoken part of the question: “Tharthar will allow no harm to befall Alia. She knows we will soon be wives together, she and I, to share the same man. We have talked, Tharthar and I.” Harah looked up at Tharthar, back to Jessica. “We have an understanding.”

Tharthar held out a hand for Alia, said: “We must hurry. The young men are leaving.”

They pressed through the hangings, the child's hand in the small woman's hand, but the child seemed to be leading.

“If Paul-Muad'Dib slays Stilgar, this will not serve the tribe,” Harah said. “Always before, it has been the way of succession, but times have changed.”

“Times have changed for you, as well,” Jessica said.

“You cannot think I doubt the outcome of such a battle,” Harah said. “Usul could not but win.”

“That was my meaning,” Jessica said.

“And you think my personal feelings enter into my judgment,” Harah said. She shook her head, her water rings tinkling at her neck. “How wrong you are. Perhaps you think, as well, that I regret not being the chosen of Usul, that I am jealous of Chani?”

“You make your own choice as you are able,” Jessica said.

“I pity Chani,” Harah said.

Jessica stiffened. “What do you mean?”

“I know what you think of Chani,” Harah said. “You think she is not the wife for your son.”

Jessica settled back, relaxed on her cushions. She shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“You could be right,” Harah said. “If you are, you may find a surprising ally—Chani herself. She wants whatever is best for
Him.”

Jessica swallowed past a sudden tightening in her throat. “Chani's very dear to me,” she said. “She could be no—”

“Your rugs are very dirty in here,” Harah said. She swept her gaze around the floor, avoiding Jessica's eyes. “So many people tramping through here all the time. You really should have them cleaned more often.”

 

PAUL WAITED on the sand outside the gigantic maker's line of approach.
I must not wait like a smuggler—impatient and jittering,
he reminded himself.
I must be part of the desert.

The thing was only minutes away now, filling the morning with the friction-hissing of its passage. Its great teeth within the cavern-circle of its mouth spread like some enormous flower. The spice odor from it dominated the air.

Paul's stillsuit rode easily on his body and he was only distantly aware of his nose plugs, the breathing mask. Stilgar's teaching, the painstaking hours on the sand, overshadowed all else.

“How far outside the maker's radius must you stand in pea sand?” Stilgar had asked him.

And he had answered correctly: “Half a meter for every meter of the maker's diameter.”

“Why?”

“To avoid the vortex of its passage and still have time to run in and mount it.”

“You've ridden the little ones bred for the seed and the Water of Life,” Stilgar had said. “But what you'll summon for your test is a wild maker, an old man of the desert. You must have proper respect for such a one.”

Now the thumper's deep drumming blended with the hiss of the approaching worm. Paul breathed deeply, smelling mineral bitterness of sand even through his filters. The wild maker, the old man of the desert, loomed almost on him. Its cresting front segments threw a sandwave that would sweep across his knees.

Come up, you lovely monster,
he thought.
Up. You hear me calling. Come up. Come up.

The wave lifted his feet. Surface dust swept across him. He steadied himself, his world dominated by the passage of that sand-clouded curving wall, that segmented cliff, the ring lines sharply defined in it.

Paul lifted his hooks, sighted along them, leaned in. He felt them bite and pull. He leaped upward, planting his feet against that wall, leaning out against the clinging barbs. This was the true instant of the testing: if he had planted the hooks correctly at the leading edge of a ring segment, opening the segment, the worm would not roll down and crush him.

The worm slowed. It glided across the thumper, silencing it. Slowly, it began to roll—up, up—bringing those irritant barbs as high as possible, away from the sand that threatened the soft inner lapping of its ring segment.

Paul found himself riding upright atop the worm. He felt exultant, like an emperor surveying his world. He suppressed a sudden urge to cavort there, to turn the worm, to show off his mastery of this creature.

Suddenly he understood why Stilgar had warned him once about brash young men who danced and played with these monsters, doing handstands on their backs, removing both hooks and replanting them before the worm could spill them.

Leaving one hook in place, Paul released the other and planted it lower down the side. When the second hook was firm and tested, he brought down the first one, thus worked his way down the side. The maker rolled, and as it rolled, it turned, coming around the sweep of flour sand where the others waited.

Paul saw them come up, using their hooks to climb, but avoiding the sensitive ring edges until they were on top. They rode at last in a triple line behind him, steadied against their hooks.

Stilgar moved up through the ranks, checked the positioning of Paul's hooks, glanced up at Paul's smiling face.

“You did it, eh?” Stilgar asked, raising his voice above the hiss of their passage. “That's what you think? You did it?” He straightened. “Now I tell you that was a very sloppy job. We have twelve-year-olds who do better. There was drumsand to your left where you waited. You could not retreat there if the worm turned that way.”

The smile slipped from Paul's face. “I saw the drumsand.”

“Then why did you not signal for one of us to take up position secondary to you? It was a thing you could do even in the test.”

Paul swallowed, faced into the wind of their passage.

“You think it bad of me to say this now,” Stilgar said. “It is my duty. I think of your worth to the troop. If you had stumbled into that drumsand, the maker would've turned toward you.”

In spite of a surge of anger, Paul knew that Stilgar spoke the truth. It took a long minute and the full effort of the training he had received from his mother for Paul to recapture a feeling of calm. “I apologize,” he said. “It will not happen again.”

“In a tight position, always leave yourself a secondary, someone to take the maker if you cannot,” Stilgar said. “Remember that we work together. That way, we're certain. We work together, eh?”

He slapped Paul's shoulder.

“We work together,” Paul agreed.

“Now,” Stilgar said, and his voice was harsh, “show me you know how to handle a maker. Which side are we on?”

Paul glanced down at the scaled ring surface on which they stood, noted the character and size of the scales, the way they grew larger off to his right, smaller to his left. Every worm, he knew, moved characteristically with one side up more frequently. As it grew older, the characteristic up-side became an almost constant thing. Bottom scales grew larger, heavier, smoother. Top scales could be told by size alone on a big worm.