Dune (33 page)

“A . . . renegade branch of the family,” she said. “That’s it, isn’t it?
Some Harkonnen cousin who–”

“You’re the Baron’s own daughter,” he said, and watched the way she pressed
her hands to her mouth. “The Baron sampled many pleasures in his youth, and once
permitted himself to be seduced. But it was for the genetic purposes of the Bene
Gesserit, by one of you.”

The way he said ‘you’ struck her like a slap. But it set her mind to working
and she could not deny his words. So many blank ends of meaning in her past
reached out now and linked. The daughter the Bene Gesserit wanted–it wasn’t to
end the old Atreides-?Harkonnen feud, but to fix some genetic factor in their
lines. What? She groped for an answer.

As though he saw inside her mind, Paul said: “They thought they were
reaching for me. But I’m not what they expected, and I’ve arrived before my
time. And they don’t know it.”

Jessica pressed her hands to her mouth.

Great Mother! He’s the Kwisatz Haderach!

She felt exposed and naked before him, realizing then that he saw her with
eyes from which little could be hidden. And that, she knew, was the basis of her
fear.

“You’re thinking I’m the Kwisatz Haderach,” he said. “Put that out of your
mind. I’m something unexpected.”

I must get word out to one of the schools, she thought. The mating index may
show what has happened.

“They won’t learn about me until it’s too late,” he said.

She sought to divert him, lowered her hands and said: “We’ll find a place
among the Fremen?”

“The Fremen have a saying they credit to Shai-?hulud, Old Father Eternity,”
he said. “They say: ‘Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.’ ”

And he thought: Yes, mother mine–among the Fremen. You’ll acquire the blue
eyes and a callus beside your lovely nose from the filter tube to your stillsuit
. . . and you’ll bear my sister: St. Alia of the Knife.

“If you’re not the Kwisatz Haderach,” Jessica said, “what–”

“You couldn’t possibly know,” he said. “You won’t believe it until you see
it.”
And he thought: I’m a seed.

He suddenly saw how fertile was the ground into which he had fallen, and
with this realization, the terrible purpose filled him, creeping through the
empty place within, threatening to choke him with grief.

He had seen two main branchings along the way ahead–in one he confronted an
evil old Baron and said: “Hello, Grandfather.” The thought of that path and what
lay along it sickened him.

The other path held long patches of grey obscurity except for peaks of
violence. He had seen a warrior religion there, a fire spreading across the
universe with the Atreides green and black banner waving at the head of fanatic
legions drunk on spice liquor. Gurney Halleck and a few others of his father’s
men–a pitiful few–were among them, all marked by the hawk symbol from the
shrine of his father’s skull.

“I can’t go that way,” he muttered. “That’s what the old witches of your
schools really want.”

“I don’t understand you, Paul,” his mother said.

He remained silent, thinking like the seed he was, thinking with the race
consciousness he had first experienced as terrible purpose. He found that he no
longer could hate the Bene Gesserit or the Emperor or even the Harkonnens. They
were all caught up in the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance,
to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes.
And the race knew only one sure way for this–the ancient way, the tried and
certain way that rolled over everything in its path: jihad.

Surely, I cannot choose that way, he thought.

But he saw again in his mind’s eye the shrine of his father’s skull and the
violence with the green and black banner waving in its midst.

Jessica cleared her throat, worried by his silence. “Then . . . the Fremen
will give us sanctuary?”

He looked up, staring across the green-?lighted tent at the inbred, patrician
lines of her face. “Yes,” he said. “That’s one of the ways.” He nodded. “Yes.
They’ll call me . . . Muad’Dib, ‘The One Who Points the Way.’ Yes . . . that’s
what they’ll call me.”

And he closed his eyes, thinking: Now, my father, I can mourn you. And he
felt the tears coursing down his cheeks.

= = = = = =

= = = = = =

When my father, the Padishah Emperor, heard of Duke Leto’s death and the manner
of it, he went into such a rage as we had never before seen. He blamed my mother
and the compact forced on him to place a Bene Gesserit on the throne. He blamed
the Guild and the evil old Baron. He blamed everyone in sight, not excepting
even me, for he said I was a witch like all the others. And when I sought to
comfort him, saying it was done according to an older law of self-?preservation
to which even the most ancient rulers gave allegiance, he sneered at me and
asked if I thought him a weakling. I saw then that he had been aroused to this
passion not by concern over the dead Duke but by what that death implied for all
royalty. As I look back on it, I think there may have been some prescience in my
father, too, for it is certain that his line and Muad’Dib’s shared common
ancestry.
-“In My Father’s House,” by the Princess Irulan

“Now Harkonnen shall kill Harkonnen,” Paul whispered.
He had awakened shortly before nightfall, sitting up in the sealed and
darkened stilltent. As he spoke, he heard the vague stirrings of his mother
where she slept against the tent’s opposite wall.

Paul glanced at the proximity detector on the floor, studying the dials
illuminated in the blackness by phosphor tubes.

“It should be night soon,” his mother said. “Why don’t you lift the tent
shades?”

Paul realized then that her breathing had been different for some time, that
she had lain silent in the darkness until certain he was awake.

“Lifting the shades wouldn’t help,” he said. “There’s been a storm. The
tent’s covered by sand. I’ll dig us out soon.”

“No sign of Duncan yet?”

“None.”

Paul rubbed absently at the ducal signet on his thumb, and a sudden rage
against the very substance of this planet which had helped kill his father set
him trembling.

“I heard the storm begin,” Jessica said.

The undemanding emptiness of her words helped restore some of his calm. His
mind focused on the storm as he had seen it begin through the transparent end of
their stilltent–cold dribbles of sand crossing the basin, then runnels and
tails furrowing the sky. He had looked up to a rock spire, seen it change shape
under the blast, becoming a low, Cheddar-?colored wedge. Sand funneled into their
basin had shadowed the sky with dull curry, then blotted out all light as the
tent was covered.

Tent bows had creaked once as they accepted the pressure, then–silence
broken only by the dim bellows wheezing of their sand snorkel pumping air from
the surface.

“Try the receiver again,” Jessica said.

“No use,” he said.

He found his stillsuit’s watertube in its clip at his neck, drew a warm
swallow into his mouth, and he thought that here he truly began an Arrakeen
existence–living on reclaimed moisture from his own breath and body. It was
flat and tasteless water, but it soothed his throat.

Jessica heard Paul drinking, felt the slickness of her own stillsuit
clinging to her body, but she refused to accept her thirst. To accept it would
require awakening fully into the terrible necessities of Arrakis where they must
guard even fractional traces of moisture, hoarding the few drops in the tent’s
catchpockets, begrudging a breath wasted on the open air.

So much easier to drift back down into sleep.

But there had been a dream in this day’s sleep, and she shivered at memory
of it. She had held dreaming hands beneath sandflow where a name had been
written: Duke Leto Atreides. The name had blurred with the sand and she had
moved to restore it, but the first letter filled before the last was begun.

The sand would not stop.

Her dream became wailing: louder and louder. That ridiculous wailing–part
of her mind had realized the sound was her own voice as a tiny child, little
more than a baby. A woman not quite visible to memory was going away.

My unknown mother, Jessica thought. The Bene Gesserit who bore me and gave
me to the Sisters because that’s what she was commanded to do. Was she glad to
rid herself of a Harkonnen child?

“The place to hit them is in the spice,” Paul said.

How can he think of attack at a time like this? she asked herself.

“An entire planet full of spice,” she said. “How can you hit them there?”

She heard him stirring, the sound of their pack being dragged across the
tent floor.

“It was sea power and air power on Caladan,” he said. “Here, it’s desert
power. The Fremen are the key.”
His voice came from the vicinity of the tent’s sphincter. Her Bene Gesserit
training sensed in his tone an unresolved bitterness toward her.

All his life he has been trained to hate Harkonnens, she thought. Now, he
finds he is Harkonnen . . . because of me. How little he knows me! I was my
Duke’s only woman. I accepted his life and his values even to defying my Bene
Gesserit orders.

The tent’s glowtab came alight under Paul’s hand, filled the domed area with
green radiance. Paul crouched at the sphincter, his stillsuit hood adjusted for
the open desert–forehead capped, mouth filter in place, nose plugs adjusted.
Only his dark eyes were visible: a narrow band of face that turned once toward
her and away.

“Secure yourself for the open,” he said, and his voice was blurred behind
the filter.

Jessica pulled the filter across her mouth, began adjusting her hood as she
watched Paul break the tent seal.

Sand rasped as he opened the sphincter and a burred fizzle of grains ran
into the tent before he could immobilize it with a static compaction tool. A
hole grew in the sandwall as the tool realigned the grains. He slipped out and
her ears followed his progress to the surface.

What will we find out there? she wondered. Harkonnen troops and the
Sardaukar, those are dangers we can expect. But what of the dangers we don’t
know?

She thought of the compaction tool and the other strange instruments in the
pack. Each of these tools suddenly stood in her mind as a sign of mysterious
dangers.

She felt then a hot breeze from surface sand touch her cheeks where they
were exposed above the filter.

“Pass up the pack.” It was Paul’s voice, low and guarded.

She moved to obey, heard the water literjons gurgle as she shoved the pack
across the floor. She peered upward, saw Paul framed against stars.

“Here,” he said and reached down, pulled the pack to the surface.

Now she saw only the circle of stars. They were like the luminous tips of
weapons aimed down at her. A shower of meteors crossed her patch of night. The
meteors seemed to her like a warning, like tiger stripes, like luminous grave
slats clabbering her blood. And she felt the chill of the price on their heads.

“Hurry up,” Paul said. “I want to collapse the tent.”

A shower of sand from the surface brushed her left hand. How much sand will
the hand hold? She asked herself.

“Shall I help you?” Paul asked.

“No.”

She swallowed in a dry throat, slipped into the hole, felt static-?packed
sand rasp under her hands. Paul reached down, took her arm. She stood beside him
on a smooth patch of starlit desert, stared around. Sand almost brimmed their
basin, leaving only a dim lip of surrounding rock. She probed the farther
darkness with her trained senses.

Noise of small animals.

Birds.

A fall of dislodged sand and faint creature sounds within it.

Paul collapsing their tent, recovering it up the hole.

Starlight displaced just enough of the night to charge each shadow with
menace. She looked at patches of blackness.

Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for
the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most
primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.

Presently, Paul stood beside her, said: “Duncan told me that if he was
captured, he could hold out . . . this long. We must leave here now.” He
shouldered the pack, crossed to the shallow lip of the basin, climbed to a ledge
that looked down on open desert.

Jessica followed automatically, noting how she now lived in her son’s orbit.

For now is my grief heavier than the sands of the seas, she thought. This
world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow’s life. I live now
for my young Duke and the daughter yet to be.

She felt the sand drag her feet as she climbed to Paul’s side.

He looked north across a line of rocks, studying a distant escarpment.

The faraway rock profile was like an ancient battleship of the seas outlined
by stars. The long swish of it lifted on an invisible wave with syllables of
boomerang antennae, funnels arcing back, a pi-?shaped upthrusting at the stern.

An orange glare burst above the silhouette and a line of brilliant purple
cut downward toward the glare.

Another line of purple!

And another upthrusting orange glare!

It was like an ancient naval battle, remembered shellfire, and the sight
held them staring.

“Pillars of fire,” Paul whispered.

A ring of red eyes lifted over the distant rock. Lines of purple laced the
sky.

“Jetflares and lasguns,” Jessica said.

The dust-?reddened first moon of Arrakis lifted above the horizon to their
left and they saw a storm trail there–a ribbon of movement over the desert.

“It must be Harkonnen ‘thopters hunting us,” Paul said. “The way they’re
cutting up the desert . . . it’s as though they were making certain they stamped
out whatever’s there . . . the way you’d stamp out a nest of insects.”