Road to Dune (42 page)

“Clever,” the Reverend Mother argued.

“It was the action of a child!” Irulan stormed. “You’ll be sorry when I’m gone! It’s a thing a child …”

“And we are about to be sorry,” Edric said.

“Not the action of a child,” the Reverend Mother said.

“But why would he take his own life?” Irulan demanded.

“Why not?” Edric asked.

“Indeed, why not?” the Reverend Mother said. “He had but one life to spend. How else could he spend it to such advantage? It was clever. It was the supreme act of intelligence. We are undone by it. I am filled with envy.”

“M’Lady,” Edric said, looking at Irulan, “do you have a religion ?”

“What are you talking about?” Irulan asked. She put a hand to her cheek, stared back at him defensively.

“Listen,” Edric said.

In the sudden silence, Irulan grew aware of a faint roaring sound, a pulse of many noises.

“What is that?” she asked.

“A mob,” the Reverend Mother said. “They’ve been told, eh?” She glanced at Edric.

“Why should you ask if I have a religion?” Irulan insisted.

“They blame you,” Edric said. “They say you killed Chani and this killed Muad’Dib.”

“What … how …” Irulan rushed to the cell door, rattled it. But the guards were gone.

“They’re investigating the noise,” Edric said. “It’s too late, anyway.”

“Why do you ask if I have a religion?” Irulan shouted, rushing back from the door to stare through the communications hole.

The Reverend Mother pulled her back, gestured toward the bed. “Sit down.”

“Religion helps at times,” Edric said. “It’s …”

“Never mind,” the Reverend Mother said, shaking her head.

The roaring sound had grown louder. They could make out individual voices now.

“I demand to be let out of here,” Irulan said in a small child voice.

“Once I asked him about religion and his god-orientation,” Edric said, looking at the Reverend Mother. “It was an interesting conversation.”

“Oh,” the Reverend Mother said. “What did you ask?”

“Among other things, I asked if god talked to him.”

“And he said?”

“He said all men talk to god. And I asked him if he was a god.”

“I’ll warrant he had a devious answer for that one,” the Reverend Mother said. She had to raise her voice above the increasing clamor.

“He told me that some say so.”

The Reverend Mother nodded.

“And I asked him,” Edric said, “if he said so. And he said that very few gods in history ever lived among men. I taxed him with not answering my question, and he said: ‘So I haven’t … so I haven’t.’”

“I wish I’d known that,” the Reverend Mother said.

“Why won’t they come and let me out of here?” Irulan demanded from her position seated on the bed.

The Reverend Mother moved to the bed, sat down beside Irulan, took one of her hands. “Never mind, child. You are about to become a saint.”

They gave up talking then because the cell had become the inside of a terrifying drum, a battering ram pounding on the door.

Presently, the door shattered, slammed back, and the mob poured through. The first of them died rather abruptly, but a mob is numberless. Eventually, they prevailed and tore the cell’s occupants limb from limb.

[FH handwritten note: Reverend Mother can’t flee, too old. Perhaps she delays the mob for Irulan to escape?]

BLIND PAUL IN THE DESERT

(This was the original ending to
Dune Messiah.
)

A
bruptly, he sat up, looked around him in the green gloom of the stilltent. The fremkit pack lay at his feet. He felt contained by the tent and these few possessions. The fremkit held his attention. Such a small pile of human artifacts. They were, though, part of his ability to stay alive in this place. It was very curious. A great deal of death had gone into the experience which had created these few things … yet, they represented life. He considered abandoning some of the items in the kit. Which ones, he wondered, might prove most definitely fatal by their absence? The baradye pistol? He drew it from the pack, tossed it aside. Not the pistol. Why should he want to lay down a marker pattern in the sand, a visible call for help?

His probing fingers encountered a scrap of spice paper. He brought it into the light, read it: an official proclamation on the necessities to be packed in a fremkit and the order of their insertion. An official proclamation! He realized he must’ve signed it. Yes, there it was: “By order of Muad’Dib.” But he had no memory of the signing.

“It shall be the solemn duty of the official in charge …”

The plodding, self-important language of government enraged him. He crumpled the paper, hurled it aside. What had happened, he wondered, to the dutiful sounds, the clean meanings that screened out nonsense? Somewhere, in some lost where, they had been walled off, sealed up against chance rediscovery. His mind quested, Mentat fashion. Patterns of knowledge glistened there. Mermaid hair might wave thus, he thought, beckoning … beckoning the enchanted hunter into emerald caverns …

With an abrupt start, he drew back from the ruh-chasm that invited him to plunge into catatonic forgetfulness. So, he thought, the Mentat computation said he should disappear within himself. Reasons? Sufficient. He had seen them in the instant of escape. His life had seemed then to stretch out as long as the existence of the universe. Prescience already had granted him an infinity of experiences. But the real flesh condensed, lay finite and reduced his emerald cavern to a stilltent beginning to drum with the pulse of a wind. Sand chattered like pecking birds against taut surfaces.

Paul scrambled to the door, unsealed it, slipped out and scanned the desert, saw the obvious stormsign: tan gusts, no birds, the abrasive-dry smell of dust. He sealed his stillsuit and tried to peer through the brown haze concealing the distances. A vortex of winding dust lifted out of the haze far off in the bled. It told Paul what lay beneath. He pictured the storm, a giant worm of sand and dust—two hundred or more kilometers of rolling, hissing violence. It had come a long way without hindrance, building up speed and power. It could cross six hundred or more kilometers of desert in an hour. If he did no more than stand here, that storm would come to him, cut the flesh from his bones, etch his bones down to pale splinters. He would become one with the desert. The desert would fulfill him.

It occurred to Paul then to wonder about life’s insistent seeking after death. Wonder moved him. He decided that he could not let the planet simply take him. There could be no giving up to destiny for an Atreides, not even in the full awareness of the inevitable.

There’d be no time to salvage the tent, Paul saw. He reached in, grabbed the fremkit, sealed its cover, carried it dangling from one hand as he scrambled over the rock ridge to the lee side. Survival required a niche sheltered from that storm, but there wasn’t a break in the rocks on this side. Another storm had scoured the surface here into a smooth concavity down which he slid to the encroaching sand. Fremen had other resources, though. He chose the siff curve of a dune, ran toward it. As he reached the crest, the wind gusted. It tumbled him, rolled him, hissing and pouring sand over onto the slipface. The storm pursued him as he fell. In the valley of the dunes, he burrowed into the sand, fighting for inches, his right hand hampered by the straps of the fremkit. A sandfall from the crest slid around him, trapping his feet. Dust had clogged his stillsuit filters. He spat out the mouthpiece, pulled the robe over his head as another sandfall buried him.

In the abrupt dimming of the stormsound, Paul hunched his shoulders, made himself a small space into which to drag the fremkit. He found the compaction tool in it by feel, built himself a sandwalled nest. Presently, he had room enough to get out the snorkel. The air already was heavy with his exhalations. He drilled the snorkel at a downwind slant upward through the sand, feeling for the surface, for air. When he found it, the filters had to be blown free, and thereafter needed clearing on almost every alternate breath.

It was a mother of a storm up there. He had been right in its path, dead center. There might be a hundred feet of sand through which to burrow free when it passed. He listened to the distant keening of wind coming through the snorkel. Would a worm come to the sound of his burrowing? he wondered. Was that how it would be?

Paul sat back against the hard-packed wall of his nest, kept the snorkel mouthpiece between his teeth. Blow to clear it … inhale, exhale, inhale … blow to clear …

The fremkit glowtabs were green jewels beside him, the only radiance in the darkness which confined him. Was this to be his tomb? Paul wondered. He found the thought vaguely humorous. It was a mouse nest for Muad’Dib, for Muad’Dib the jumping mouse.

For a while, it amused him to compose epitaphs in his head. He died on Arrakis. He was tested here and found to be human …

And he thought of how his followers would refer to him when he had gone beyond their reach. They’d insist on speaking of him in terms of seas, he knew. Despite the fact that his life was soaked in dust, water would follow him into the tomb.

“He foundered,” they’d say.

Never again to see rain,
he thought.
Or trees.

“I’ll never again see an orchard,” he said. His voice sounded thinly resonant within the sand nest.

Fremen would see rain, he knew. And many orchards finer than the ones at Tabr Sietch.

The thought of Fremen with muddy feet struck him as a curious thing.

Water.

Moisture.

He remembered the dew market where the water sellers had met in Arrakeen. They were disbanded now, destroyed by the changes which dripped from the hands of Muad’Dib.

Muad’Dib, the foreigner whom they hated.

Muad’Dib was a creature from another world. Caladan—where was Caladan? What was Caladan to a man of Arrakis? Muad’Dib carried a subtle, alien chemistry into the cycles of Arrakis. He disturbed the secret life of the desert. Sun and moons of Arrakis imposed their own rhythms onto the desert. But Paul Atreides had come. Arrakis had welcomed him as a savior, called him Mahdi and Muad’Dib … and given him a secret name, Usul, the base of the pillar. None of this changed the fact that he was an interloper, product of other rhythms, poison to Arrakis.

Interloper.

Weren’t all men interlopers, though? he asked himself. They put on a mask of words, a persona, and they went out into the wild space, cluttered the universe with their stellar migrations.

Paul shook his head in the darkness.

He had uncluttered the universe somewhat. Men would remember Muad’Dib’s Jihad for that, at least.

He grew aware that the snorkel was silent. Had the storm passed? He blew on the mouthpiece to clear it of dust. No keening of wind came down the tube.

Let a worm come,
he thought.
I must at least try to die up there in the open, standing on my planet.
He took the compaction tool from the fremkit, began boring a slanting burrow upward. Sand rasped and fell around him while he worked. Sand scraped against the fremkit as he pulled it up behind him with a pack strap caught on one foot—a trick Otheym had taught him.

But Otheym was dead now, crisped in the searing blast of the stone-burner. One of Otheym’s tricks for survival lived on, though. Otheym had learned it from someone before him. And someone else before that had passed it along. Simple thing, but vital: don’t lose your fremkit, don’t let it slow your digging; carry the thing along by one of its straps hooked over a foot.

Paul felt that his foot was really another man’s foot far back in the history of Dune. He remembered a day in his beginnings on this planet, before the Fremen had found him and trained him. He had lost a fremkit, the key to survival. He and his mother could have died there in the desert without the tools represented by that kit. Her prana bindu training had saved them then—the training which went into the depths of the mind and to the smallest muscle.

He realized abruptly that he had been ashamed of his mother for most of his life on Arrakis. She was a Bene Gesserit. She carried the hated blood of the Harkonnens who had killed his father. But before her there had been others—countless humans, each with a figurative foot hooked in the strap of a figurative fremkit.

While his mind worried over such thoughts, he had burrowed very near the surface, Paul knew. Now, the cautious breaking out onto the surface. A Fremen was virtually helpless in this moment. Anything might await him out there, deadly enemies attracted by the sounds of digging.

Cautiously, he probed upward to the slope of dune that he knew must be near. Instinct told him of that nearness.

Daylight came with a burst of tumbling sand.

Paul waited, listening, probing with every sense.

No shadows crossed the hole—only grey sky darkening away toward sunset. There was a strong smell of spice, though, a touch of chill air onto his cheeks where the stillsuit hood left his skin exposed. A zephyr hissing of sand granules came to his ears—a background carrier wave of sound. He pressed an ear to the burrow wall—no distant roar of a worm, no thumping, no dislodging of sand from careless feet.

Paul fitted his noseplugs into place, sealed his suit carefully, secured his fremkit and slid out of the burrow onto the windward slope of a dune. The sand was firm, compacted hard by the wind here. It felt crusty under his feet. The zephyr picked up fluttering bits of something from the crest above him. Brown flakes fell all around. Paul captured one, held it to the filters, inhaled the powerful, giddy aroma of fresh melange. He swept his gaze over the slope. The desert all around him was thick with spice—a fortune in melange, a real spice pocket up from the deeps. He threw the flake of spice into the air, climbed up the duneface through drifts of melange.

Near the crest, he listened with ear against the sand. No wormsound came from the desert in spite of the noise he’d made burrowing to the surface.

Perhaps there are no worms in this region,
he thought.