Dune (41 page)

Jessica sat up straight against the rock.

Paul ignored her, leaped to his feet, and was off down the wind-?compacted
surface that spilled from the end of the fissure to the desert’s floor.

She watched the way he walked, breaking his stride–step . . . pause, step-
step . . . slide . . . pause . . .

There was no rhythm to it that might tell a marauding worm something not of
the desert moved here.

Paul reached the spice patch, shoveled a mound of it into a fold of his
robe, returned to the fissure. He spilled the spice onto the sand in front of
Jessica, squatted and began dismantling the paracompass, using the point of his
knife. The compass face came off. He removed his sash, spread the compass parts
on it, lifted out the power pack. The dial mechanism came out next, leaving an
empty dished compartment in the instrument.

“You’ll need water,” Jessica said.

Paul took the catchtube from his neck, sucked up a mouthful, expelled it
into the dished compartment.

If this fails, that’s water wasted, Jessica thought. But it won’t matter
then, anyway.

With his knife, Paul cut open the power pack, spilled its crystals into the
water. They foamed slightly, subsided.

Jessica’s eyes caught motion above them. She looked up to see a line of
hawks along the rim of the fissure. They perched there staring down at the open
water.

Great Mother! she thought. They can sense water even at that distance!
Paul had the cover back on the paracompass, leaving off the reset button
which gave a small hole into the liquid. Taking the reworked instrument in one
hand, a handful of spice in the other, Paul went back up the fissure, studying
the lay of the slope. His robe billowed gently without the sash to hold it. He
waded part way up the slope, kicking off sand rivulets, spurts of dust.

Presently, he stopped, pressed a pinch of the spice into the paracompass,
shook the instrument case.

Green foam boiled out of the hole where the reset button had been. Paul
aimed it at the slope, spread a low dike there, began kicking away the sand
beneath it, immobilizing the opened face with more foam.

Jessica moved to a position below him, called out: “May I help?”

“Come up and dig,” he said. “We’ve about three meters to go. It’s going to
be a near thing.” As he spoke, the foam stopped billowing from the instrument.

“Quickly,” Paul said. “No telling how long this foam will hold the sand.”

Jessica scrambled up beside Paul as he sifted another pinch of spice into
the hole, shook the paracompass case. Again, foam boiled from it.

As Paul directed the foam barrier, Jessica dug with her hands, hurling the
sand down the slope. “How deep?” she panted.

“About three meters,” he said. “And I can only approximate the position. We
may have to widen this hole.” He moved a step aside, slipping in loose sand.
“Slant your digging backward. Don’t go straight down.”

Jessica obeyed.

Slowly, the hole went down, reaching a level even with the floor of the
basin and still no sign of the pack.

Could I have miscalculated? Paul asked himself. I’m the one that panicked
originally and caused this mistake. Has that warped my ability?

He looked at the paracompass. Less than two ounces of the acid infusion
remained.

Jessica straightened in the hole, rubbed a foam-?stained hand across her
cheek. Her eyes met Paul’s.

“The upper face,” Paul said. “Gently, now.” He added another pinch of spice
to the container, sent the foam boiling around Jessica’s hands as she began
cutting a vertical face in the upper slant of the hole. On the second pass, her
hands encountered something hard. Slowly, she worked out a length of strap with
a plastic buckle.

“Don’t move any more of it,” Paul said and his voice was almost a whisper.

“We’re out of foam.”

Jessica held the strap in one hand, looked up at him.

Paul threw the empty paracompass down onto the floor of the basin, said:
“Give me your other hand. Now listen carefully. I’m going to pull you to the
side and downhill. Don’t let go of that strap. We won’t get much more spill from
the top. This slope has stabilized itself. All I’m going to aim for is to keep
your head free of the sand. Once that hole’s filled, we can dig you out and pull
up the pack.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Ready?”

“Ready.” She tensed her fingers on the strap.

With one surge, Paul had her half out of the hole, holding her head up as
the foam barrier gave way and sand spilled down. When it had subsided, Jessica
remained buried to the waist, her left arm and shoulder still under the sand,
her chin protected on a fold of Paul’s robe. Her shoulder ached from the strain
put on it.

“I still have the strap,” she said.

Slowly, Paul worked his hand into the sand beside her, found the strap.
“Together,” he said. “Steady pressure. We mustn’t break it.”
More sand spilled down as they worked the pack up. When the strap cleared
the surface, Paul stopped, freed his mother from the sand. Together then they
pulled the pack downslope and out of its trap.

In a few minutes they stood on the floor of the fissure holding the pack
between them.

Paul looked at his mother. Foam stained her face, her robe. Sand was caked
to her where the foam had dried. She looked as though she had been a target for
balls of wet, green sand.

“You look a mess,” he said.

“You’re not so pretty yourself,” she said.

They started to laugh, then sobered.

“That shouldn’t have happened,” Paul said. “I was careless.”

She shrugged, feeling caked sand fall away from her robe.

“I’ll put up the tent,” he said. “Better slip off that robe and shake it
out.” He turned away, taking the pack.

Jessica nodded, suddenly too tired to answer.

“There’s anchor holes in the rock,” Paul said. “Someone’s tented here
before.”

Why not? she thought as she brushed at her robe. This was a likely place–
deep in rock walls and facing another cliff some four kilometers away–far
enough above the desert to avoid worms but close enough for easy access before a
crossing.

She turned, seeing that Paul had the tent up, its rib-?domed hemisphere
blending with the rock walls of the fissure. Paul stepped past her, lifting his
binoculars. He adjusted their internal pressure with a quick twist, focused the
oil lenses on the other cliff lifting golden tan in morning light across open
sand.

Jessica watched as he studied that apocalyptic landscape, his eyes probing
into sand rivers and canyons.

“There are growing things over there,” he said.

Jessica found the spare binoculars in the pack beside the tent, moved up
beside Paul.

“There,” he said, holding the binoculars with one hand and pointing with the
other.

She looked where he pointed.

“Saguaro,” she said. “Scrawny stuff.”

“There may be people nearby,” Paul said.

“That could be the remains of a botanical testing station,” she warned.

“This is pretty far south into the desert,” he said. He lowered his
binoculars, rubbed beneath his filter baffle, feeling how dry and chapped his
lips were, sensing the dusty taste of thirst in his mouth. “This has the feeling
of a Fremen place,” he said.

“Are we certain the Fremen will be friendly?” she asked.

“Kynes promised their help.”

But there’s desperation in the people of this desert, she thought. I felt
some of it myself today. Desperate people might kill us for our water.

She closed her eyes and, against this wasteland, conjured in her mind a
scene from Caladan. There had been a vacation trip once on Caladan–she and the
Duke Leto, before Paul’s birth. They’d flown over the southern jungles, above
the weed-?wild shouting leaves and rice paddies of the deltas. And they had seen
the ant lines in the greenery–man-?gangs carrying their loads on suspensor-
buoyed shoulder poles. And in the sea reaches there’d been the white petals of
trimaran dhows.

All of it gone.

Jessica opened her eyes to the desert stillness, to the mounting warmth of
the day. Restless heat devils were beginning to set the air aquiver out on the
open sand. The other rock face across from them was like a thing seen through
cheap glass.

A spill of sand spread its brief curtain across the open end of the fissure.
The sand hissed down, loosed by puffs of morning breeze, by the hawks that were
beginning to lift away from the clifftop. When the sandfall was gone, she still
heard it hissing. It grew louder, a sound that once heard, was never forgotten.

“Worm,” Paul whispered.

It came from their right with an uncaring majesty that could not be ignored.
A twisting burrow-?mound of sand cut through the dunes within their field of
vision. The mound lifted in front, dusting away like a bow wave in water. Then
it was gone, coursing off to the left.

The sound diminished, died.

“I’ve seen space frigates that were smaller,” Paul whispered.

She nodded, continuing to stare across the desert. Where the worm had passed
there remained that tantalizing gap. It flowed bitterly endless before them,
beckoning beneath its horizontal collapse of skyline.

“When we’ve rested,” Jessica said, “we should continue with your lessons.”

He suppressed a sudden anger, said: “Mother, don’t you think we could do
without . . .”

“Today you panicked,” she said. “You know your mind and bindu-?nervature
perhaps better than I do, but you’ve much yet to learn about your body’s prana-
musculature. The body does things of itself sometimes, Paul, and I can teach you
about this. You must learn to control every muscle, every fiber of your body.
You need review of the hands. We’ll start with finger muscles, palm tendons, and
tip sensitivity.” She turned away. “Come, into the tent, now.”

He flexed the fingers of his left hand, watching her crawl through the
sphincter valve, knowing that he could not deflect her from this determination .
. . that he must agree.

Whatever has been done to me, I’ve been a party to it, he thought.

Review of the hand!

He looked at his hand. How inadequate it appeared when measured against such
creatures as that worm.

= = = = = =

We came from Caladan–a paradise world for our form of fife. There existed no
need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind–we could
see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have
always paid for achieving a paradise in this life–we went soft, we lost our
edge.
-from “Muad’Dib: Conversations” by the Princess Irulan

“So you’re the great Gurney Halleck,” the man said.

Halleck stood staring across the round cavern office at the smuggler seated
behind a metal desk. The man wore Fremen robes and had the half-?tint blue eyes
that told of off-?planet foods in his diet. The office duplicated a space
frigate’s master control center–communications and viewscreens along a thirty-
degree arc of wall, remote arming and firing banks adjoining, and the desk
formed as a wall projection–part of the remaining curve.

“I am Staban Tuek, son of Esmar Tuek,” the smuggler said.

“Then you’re the one I owe thanks for the help we’ve received,” Halleck
said.

“Ah-?h-?h, gratitude,” the smuggler said. “Sit down.”

A ship-?type bucket seat emerged from the wall beside the screens and Halleck
sank onto it with a sigh, feeling his weariness. He could see his own reflection
now in a dark surface beside the smuggler and scowled at the lines of fatigue in
his lumpy face. The inkvine scar along his jaw writhed with the scowl.
Halleck turned from his reflection, stared at Tuek. He saw the family
resemblance in the smuggler now–the father’s heavy, over-?hanging eyebrows and
rock planes of cheeks and nose.

“Your men tell me your father is dead, killed by the Harkonnens,” Halleck
said.

“By the Harkonnens or by a traitor among your people,” Tuek said.

Anger overcame part of Halleck’s fatigue. He straightened, said: “Can you
name the traitor?”

“We are not sure.”

“Thufir Hawat suspected the Lady Jessica.”

“Ah-?h-?h, the Bene Gesserit witch . . . perhaps. But Hawat is now a Harkonnen
captive.”

“I heard,” Halleck took a deep breath. “It appears we’ve a deal more killing
ahead of us.”

“We will do nothing to attract attention to us,” Tuek said.

Halleck stiffened. “But–”

“You and those of your men we’ve saved are welcome to sanctuary among us,”
Tuek said. “You speak of gratitude. Very well; work off your debt to us. We can
always use good men. We’ll destroy you out of hand, though, if you make the
slightest open move against the Harkonnens.”

“But they killed your father, man!”

“Perhaps. And if so, I’ll give you my father’s answer to those who act
without thinking: ‘A stone is heavy and the sand is weighty; but a fool’s wrath
is heavier than them both.’ ”

“You mean to do nothing about it, then?” Halleck sneered.

“You did not hear me say that. I merely say I will protect our contract with
the Guild. The Guild requires that we play a circumspect game. There are other
ways of destroying a foe.”

“Ah-?h-?h-?h-?h.”

“Ah, indeed. If you’ve a mind to seek out the witch, have at it. But I warn
you that you’re probably too late . . .and we doubt she’s the one you want, any
way.”

“Hawat made few mistakes.”

“He allowed himself to fall into Harkonnen hands.”

“You think he’s the traitor?”

Tuek shrugged. “This is academic. We think the witch is dead. At least the
Harkonnens believe it.”

“You seem to know a great deal about the Harkonnens.”

“Hints and suggestions . . . rumors and hunches.”

“We are seventy-?four men,” Halleck said. “If you seriously wish us to enlist
with you, you must believe our Duke is dead.”