Dune (72 page)

“He lives,” Jessica said. “I assure you he lives. But the thread of his life
is so thin it could easily escape detection. There are some among the leaders
already muttering that the mother speaks and not the Reverend Mother, that my
son is truly dead and I do not want to give up his water to the tribe.”

“How long has he been this way?” Chani asked. She disengaged her hand from
Jessica’s, moved farther into the room.

“Three weeks,” Jessica said. “I spent almost a week trying to revive him.
There were meetings, arguments . . . investigations. Then I sent for you. The
Fedaykin obey my orders, else I might not have been able to delay the . . . “
She wet her lips with her tongue, watching Chani cross to Paul.

Chani stood over him now, looking down on the soft beard of youth that
framed his face, tracing with her eyes the high browline, the strong nose, the
shuttered eyes — the features so peaceful in this rigid repose.

”How does he take nourishment?“ Chani asked.

”The demands of his flesh are so slight he does not yet need food,“ Jessica
said.

”How many know of what has happened?“ Chani asked.

”Only his closest advisers, a few of the leaders, the Fedaykin and, of
course, whoever administered the poison.“

”There is no clue to the poisoner?“

”And it’s not for want of investigating,“ Jessica said.

”What do the Fedaykin say?“ Chani asked.

”They believe Paul is in a sacred trance, gathering his holy powers before
the final battles. This is a thought I’ve cultivated.“

Chani lowered herself to her knees beside the pad, bent close to Paul’s
face. She sensed an immediate difference in the air about his face . . . but it
was only the spice, the ubiquitous spice whose odor permeated everything in
Fremen life. Still . . .

”You were not born to the spice as we were,“ Chani said. ”Have you
investigated the possibility that his body has rebelled against too much spice
in his diet?“

”Allergy reactions are all negative,“ Jessica said.

She closed her eyes, as much to blot out this scene as because of sudden
realization of fatigue. How long have I been without sleep? she asked herself.
Too long.

”When you change the Water of Life,“ Chani said, ”you do it within yourself
by the inward awareness. Have you used this awareness to test his blood?“

”Normal Fremen blood,“ Jessica said. ”Completely adapted to the diet and the
life here.“

Chani sat back on her heels, submerging her fears in thought as she studied
Paul’s face. This was a trick she had learned from watching the Reverend
Mothers. Time could be made to serve the mind. One concentrated the entire
attention.

Presently, Chani said: ”Is there a maker here?“

”There are several,“ Jessica said with a touch of weariness. ”We are never
without them these days. Each victory requires its blessing. Each ceremony
before a raid –“

”But Paul Muad’Dib has held himself aloof from these ceremonies,“ Chani
said.

Jessica nodded to herself, remembering her son’s ambivalent feelings toward
the spice drug and the prescient awareness it precipitated.

”How did you know this?“ Jessica asked.

”It is spoken.“

”Too much is spoken,“ Jessica said bitterly.

”Get me the raw Water of the maker,“ Chani said.

Jessica stiffened at the tone of command in Chani’s voice, then observed the
intense concentration in the younger woman and said: ”At once.” She went out
through the hangings to send a waterman.

Chani sat staring at Paul. If he has tried to do this, she thought. And it’s
the sort of thing he might try . . .

Jessica knelt beside Chani, holding out a plain camp ewer. The charged odor
of the poison was sharp in Chani’s nostrils. She dipped a finger in the fluid,
held the finger close to Paul’s nose.

The skin along the bridge of his nose wrinkled slightly. Slowly, the
nostrils flared.
Jessica gasped.

Chani touched the dampened finger to Paul’s upper lip.

He drew in a long, sobbing breath. “What is this?” Jessica demanded.

“Be still,” Chani said. “You must convert a small amount of the sacred
water. Quickly!”

Without questioning, because she recognized the tone of awareness in Chani’s
voice, Jessica lifted the ewer to her mouth, drew in a small sip.

Paul’s eyes flew open. He stared upward at Chani.

“It is not necessary for her to change the Water,” he said. His voice was
weak, but steady.

Jessica, a sip of the fluid on her tongue, found her body rallying,
converting the poison almost automatically. In the light elevation the ceremony
always imparted, she sensed the life-?glow from Paul — a radiation there
registering on her senses.

In that instant, she knew.

“You drank the sacred water!” she blurted.

“One drop of it,” Paul said. “So small . . . one drop.”

“How could you do such a foolish thing?” she demanded.

“He is your son,” Chani said.

Jessica glared at her.

A rare smile, warm and full of understanding, touched Paul’s lips. “Hear my
beloved,” he said. “Listen to her, Mother. She knows.”

“A thing that others can do, he must do,” Chani said.

“When I had the drop in my mouth, when I felt it and smelled it, when I knew
what it was doing to me, then I knew I could do the thing that you have done,”
he said. “Your Bene Gesserit proctors speak of the Kwisatz Haderach, but they
cannot begin to guess the many places I have been. In the few minutes I . . . ”
He broke off, looking at Chani with a puzzled frown. “Chani? How did you get
here? You’re supposed to be . . . Why are you here?”

He tried to push himself onto his elbows. Chani pressed him back gently.

“Please, my Usul,” she said.

“I feel so weak,” he said. His gaze darted around the room. “How long have I
been here?”

“You’ve been three weeks in a coma so deep that the spark of life seemed to
have fled,” Jessica said.

“But it was . . . I took it just a moment ago and . . . ”

“A moment for you, three weeks of fear for me,” Jessica said.

“It was only one drop, but I converted it,” Paul said. “I changed the Water
of Life.” And before Chani or Jessica could stop him, he dipped his hand into
the ewer they had placed on the floor beside him, and he brought the dripping
hand to his mouth, swallowed the palm-?cupped liquid.

“Paul!” Jessica screamed.

He grabbed her hand, faced her with a death’s head grin, and he sent his
awareness surging over her.

The rapport was not as tender, not as sharing, not as encompassing as it had
been with Alia and with the Old Reverend Mother in the cavern . . . but it was a
rapport: a sense-?sharing of the entire being. It shook her, weakened her, and
she cowered in her mind, fearful of him.

Aloud, he said: “You speak of a place where you cannot enter? This place
which the Reverend Mother cannot face, show it to me.”

She shook her head, terrified by the very thought.

“Show it to me!” he commanded.

“No!”

But she could not escape him. Bludgeoned by the terrible force of him, she
closed her eyes and focused inward — the-?direction-?that-?is-?dark.

Paul’s consciousness flowed through and around her and into the darkness.
She glimpsed the place dimly before her mind blanked itself away from the
terror. Without knowing why, her whole being trembled at what she had seen — a
region where a wind blew and sparks glared, where rings of light expanded and
contracted, where rows of tumescent white shapes flowed over and under and
around the lights, driven by darkness and a wind out of nowhere.

Presently, she opened her eyes, saw Paul staring up at her. He still held
her hand, but the terrible rapport was gone. She quieted her trembling. Paul
released her hand. It was as though some crutch had been removed. She staggered
up and back, would have fallen had not Chani jumped to support her.

“Reverend Mother!” Chani said. “What is wrong?”

“Tired,” Jessica whispered. “So . . . tired.”

“Here,” Chani said. “Sit here.” She helped Jessica to a cushion against the
wall.

The strong young arms felt so good to Jessica. She clung to Chani.

“He has, in truth, seen the Water of Life?” Chani asked. She disengaged
herself from Jessica’s grip.

“He has seen,” Jessica whispered. Her mind still rolled and surged from the
contact. It was like stepping to solid land after weeks on a heaving sea. She
sensed the old Reverend Mother within her . . . and all the others awakened and
questioning; “What was that? What happened? Where was that place?”

Through it all threaded the realization that her son was the Kwisatz
Haderach, the one who could be many places at once. He was the fact out of the
Bene Gesserit dream. And the fact gave her no peace.

“What happened?” Chani demanded.

Jessica shook her head.

Paul said: “There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an
ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within
himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see
into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a
woman, the situation is reversed.”

Jessica looked up, found Chani was staring at her while listening to Paul.

“Do you understand me, Mother?” Paul asked.

She could only nod.

“These things are so ancient within us,” Paul said, “that they’re ground
into each separate cell of our bodies. We’re shaped by such forces. You can say
to yourself, ‘Yes, I see how such a thing may be.’ But when you look inward and
confront the raw force of your own life unshielded, you see your peril. You see
that this could overwhelm you. The greatest peril to the Giver is the force that
takes. The greatest peril to the Taker is the force that gives. It’s as easy to
be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.”

“And you, my son,” Jessica asked, “are you one who gives or one who takes?”

“I’m at the fulcrum,” he said. “I cannot give without taking and I cannot
take without . . . ” He broke off, looking to the wall at his right.

Chani felt a draft against her cheek, turned to see the hangings close.

“It was Otheym,” Paul said. “He was listening.”

Accepting the words, Chani was touched by some of the prescience that
haunted Paul, and she knew a thing-?yet-?to-?be as though it already had occurred.
Otheym would speak of what he had seen and heard. Others would spread the story
until it was a fire over the land. Paul-?Muad’Dib is not as other men, they would
say. There can be no more doubt. He is a man, yet he sees through to the Water
of Life in the way of a Reverend Mother. He is indeed the Lisan al-?Gaib.

“You have seen the future, Paul,” Jessica said. “Will you say what you’ve
seen?”

“Not the future,” he said. “I’ve seen the Now.” He forced himself to a
sitting position, waved Chani aside as she moved to help him. “The Space above
Arrakis is filled with the ships of the Guild.”

Jessica trembled at the certainty in his voice.
“The Padishah Emperor himself is there,” Paul said. He looked at the rock
ceiling of his cell. “With his favorite Truthsayer and five legions of
Sardaukar. The old Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is there with Thufir Hawat beside
him and seven ships jammed with every conscript he could muster. Every Great
House has its raiders above us . . . waiting.”

Chani shook her head, unable to look away from Paul. His strangeness, the
flat tone of voice, the way he looked through her, filled her with awe.

Jessica tried to swallow in a dry throat, said: “For what are they waiting?”

Paul looked at her. “For the Guild’s permission to land. The Guild will
strand on Arrakis any force that lands without permission.”

“The Guild’s protecting us?” Jessica asked.

“Protecting us! The Guild itself caused this by spreading tales about what
we do here and by reducing troop transport fares to a point where even the
poorest Houses are up there now waiting to loot us.”

Jessica noted the lack of bitterness in his tone, wondered at it. She
couldn’t doubt his words — they had that same intensity she’d seen in him the
night he’d revealed the path of the future that’d taken them among the Fremen.

Paul took a deep breath, said: “Mother, you must change a quantity of the
Water for us. We need the catalyst. Chani, have a scout force sent out . . . to
find a pre-?spice mass. If we plant a quantity of the Water of Life above a pre-
spice mass, do you know what will happen?”

Jessica weighed his words, suddenly saw through to his meaning. “Paul!” she
gasped.

“The Water of Death,” he said. “It’d be a chain reaction.” He pointed to the
floor. “Spreading death among the little makers, killing a vector of the life
cycle that includes the spice and the makers. Arrakis will become a true
desolation — without spice or maker.”

Chani put a hand to her mouth, shocked to numb silence by the blasphemy
pouring from Paul’s lips.

“He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it,” Paul said. “We can
destroy the spice.”

“What stays the Guild’s hand?” Jessica whispered.

“They’re searching for me,” Paul said. “Think of that! The finest Guild
navigators, men who can quest ahead through time to find the safest course for
the fastest Heighliners, all of them seeking me . . .and unable to find me. How
they tremble! They know I have their secret here!” Paul held out his cupped
hand. “Without the spice they’re blind!”

Chani found her voice. “You said you see the now!”

Paul lay back, searching the spread-?out present, its limits extended into
the future and into the past, holding onto the awareness with difficulty as the
spice illumination began to fade.

“Go do as I commanded,” he said. “The future’s becoming as muddled for the
Guild as it is for me. The lines of vision are narrowing. Everything focuses
here where the spice is . . . where they’ve dared not interfere before . . .
because to interfere was to lose what they must have. But now they’re desperate.
All paths lead into darkness.”