Dune (58 page)

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Authors: Frank Herbert

Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General

BOOK: Dune
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But it was unlike any other drug of her experience, and Bene Gesserit
training included the taste of many drugs.

Chani’s features were so clear, as though outlined in light.

A drug.

Whirling silence settled around Jessica. Every fiber of her body accepted
the fact that something profound had happened to it. She felt that she was a
conscious mote, smaller than any subatomic particle, yet capable of motion and
of sensing her surroundings. Like an abrupt revelation–the curtains whipped
away–she realized she had become aware of a psychokinesthetic extension of
herself. She was the mote, yet not the mote.

The cavern remained around her–the people. She sensed them: Paul, Chani,
Stilgar, the Reverend Mother Ramallo.

Reverend Mother!

At the school there had been rumors that some did not survive the Reverend
Mother ordeal, that the drug took them.

Jessica focused her attention on the Reverend Mother Ramallo, aware now that
all this was happening in a frozen instant of time–suspended time for her
alone.

Why is time suspended? she asked herself. She stared at the frozen
expressions around her, seeing a dust mote above Chani’s head, stopped there.

Waiting.

The answer to this instant came like an explosion in her consciousness: her
personal time was suspended to save her life.
She focused on the psychokinesthetic extension of herself, looking within,
and was confronted immediately with a cellular core, a pit of blackness from
which she recoiled.

That is the place where we cannot look, she thought. There is the place the
Reverend Mothers are so reluctant to mention–the place where only a Kwisatz
Haderach may look.

This realization returned a small measure of confidence, and again she
ventured to focus on the psychokinesthetic extension, becoming a mote-?self that
searched within her for danger.

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.

Ah-?h-?h!

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.

With the old Reverend Mother!

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.

I did it, my poor, unformed, dear little daughter, I brought you into this
universe and exposed your awareness to all its varieties without any defenses.
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.”

Let the catalyst do its work, she thought. Let the people drink of it and
have their awareness of each other heightened for awhile. The drug is safe now .
. . now that a Reverend Mother has changed it.

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.

Ah-?h-?h-?h-?h . . . the old Reverend Mother.

“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 strengthen 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.

I’m like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the
first moment of awareness–until one day the ability to feel is forced into
them.

The thought hung in her mind, an enclosing awareness.

And I say: “Look! I have no hands!” But the people all around me say: “What
are hands?” “

”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.

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