Children of Dune

  It was observed that the blind man wore a traditional bourka over a stillsuit which bore the mark about it of those once made only in the sietch caves of the deepest desert. It wasn't like the shabby suits being turned out these days. The nose tube which captured moisture from his breath for the recycling layers beneath the bourka was wrapped in braid, and it was the black vine braid so seldom seen anymore. The suit's mask across the lower half of his face carried green patches etched by the blown sand. All in all, this Preacher was a figure from Dune's past.

  Many among the early crowds of that winter day had noted his passage. After all, a blind Fremen remained a rarity. Fremen Law still consigned the blind to Shai-Hulud. The wording of the Law, although it was less honored in these modern, water-soft times, remained unchanged from the earliest days. The blind were a gift to Shai-Hulud. They were to be exposed in the open bled for the great worms to devour. When it was done--and there were stories which got back to the cities--it was always done out where the largest worms still ruled, those called Old Men of the Desert. A blind Fremen, then, was a curiosity, and people paused to watch the passing of this odd pair.

  The lad appeared about fourteen standard, one of the new breed who wore modified stillsuits; it left the face open to the moisture-robbing air. He had slender features, the all-blue spice-tinted eyes, a nubbin nose, and that innocuous look of innocence which so often masks cynical knowledge in the young. In contrast, the blind man was a reminder of times almost forgotten--long in stride and with a wiriness that spoke of many years on the sand with only his feet or a captive worm to carry him. He held his head in that stiff-necked rigidity which some of the blind cannot put off. The hooded head moved only when he cocked an ear at an interesting sound.

  Through the day's gathering crowds the strange pair came, arriving at last on the steps which led up like terraced hectares to the escarpment which was Alia's Temple, a fitting companion to Paul's Keep. Up the steps The Preacher went until he and his young guide came to the third landing, where pilgrims of the Hajj awaited the morning opening of those gigantic doors above them. They were doors large enough to have admitted an entire cathedral from one of the ancient religions. Passing through them was said to reduce a pilgrim's soul to motedom, sufficiently small that it could pass through the eye of a needle and enter heaven.

  At the edge of the third landing The Preacher turned, and it was as though he looked about him, seeing with his empty eye sockets the foppish city dwellers, some of them Fremen, with garments which simulated stillsuits but were only decorative fabrics, seeing the eager pilgrims fresh off the Guild space transports and awaiting that first step on the devotion which would ensure them a place in paradise.

  The landing was a noisy place: there were Mahdi Spirit Cultists in green robes and carrying live hawks trained to screech a "call to heaven." Food was being sold by shouting vendors. Many things were being offered for sale, the voices shouting in competitive stridence: there was the Dune Tarot with its booklets of commentaries imprinted on shigawire. One vendor had exotic bits of cloth "guaranteed to have been touched by Muad'Dib himself!" Another had vials of water "certified to have come from Sietch Tabr, where Muad'Dib lived." Through it all there were conversations in a hundred or more dialects of Galach interspersed with harsh gutturals and squeaks of outrine languages which were gathered under the Holy Imperium. Face dancers and little people from the suspected artisan planets of the Tleilaxu bounced and gyrated through the throng in bright clothing. There were lean faces and fat, water-rich faces. The susurration of nervous feet came from the gritty plasteel which formed the wide steps. And occasionally a keening voice would rise out of the cacophony in prayer--"Mua-a-a-ad'Dib! Mua-a-a-ad'Dib! Greet my soul's entreaty! You, who are God's anointed, greet my soul! Mua-a-a-ad'Dib!"

  Nearby among the pilgrims, two mummers played for a few coins, reciting the lines of the currently popular "Disputation of Armistead and Leandgrah. "

  The Preacher cocked his head to listen.

  The Mummers were middle-aged city men with bored voices. At a word of command, the young guide described them for The Preacher. They were garbed in loose robes, not even deigning to simulate stillsuits on their water-rich bodies. Assan Tariq thought this amusing, but The Preacher reprimanded him.

  The mummer who played the part of Leandgrah was just concluding his oration: "Bah! The universe can be grasped only by the sentient hand. That hand is what drives your precious brain, and it drives everything else that derives from the brain. You see what you have created, you become sentient, only after the hand has done its work!"

  A scattering of applause greeted his performance.

  The Preacher sniffed and his nostrils recorded the rich odors of this place: uncapped esters of poorly adjusted stillsuits, masking musks of diverse origin, the common flinty dust, exhalations of uncounted exotic diets and the aromas of rare incense which already had been ignited within Alia's Temple and now drifted down over the steps in cleverly directed currents. The Preacher's thoughts were mirrored on his face as he absorbed his surroundings: We have come to this, we Fremen!

  A sudden diversion rippled through the crowd on the landing. Sand Dancers had come into the plaza at the foot of the steps, half a hundred of them tethered to each other by elacca ropes. They obviously had been dancing thus for days, seeking a state of ecstasy. Foam dribbled from their mouths as they jerked and stamped to their secret music. A full third of them dangled unconscious from the ropes, tugged back and forth by the others like dolls on strings. One of these dolls had come awake, though, and the crowd apparently knew what to expect.

  "I have see-ee-een!" the newly awakened dancer shrieked. "I have see-ee-een !" He resisted the pull of the other dancers, darted his wild gaze right and left. "Where this city is, there will be only sand! I have see-ee-een!"

  A great swelling laugh went up from the onlookers. Even the new pilgrims joined it.

  This was too much for The Preacher. He raised both arms and roared in a voice which surely had commanded worm riders: "Silence!" The entire throng in the plaza went still at that battle cry.

  The Preacher pointed a thin hand toward the dancers, and the illusion that he actually saw them was uncanny. "Did you not hear that man? Blasphemers and idolaters! All of you! The religion of Muad'Dib is not Muad'Dib. He spurns it as he spurns you! Sand will cover this place. Sand will cover you."

  Saying this, he dropped his arms, put a hand on his young guide's shoulder, and commanded: "Take me from this place."

  Perhaps it was The Preacher's choice of words: He spurns it as he spurns you! Perhaps it was his tone, certainly something more than human, a vocality trained surely in the arts of the Bene Gesserit Voice which commanded by mere nuances of subtle inflection. Perhaps it was only the inherent mysticism of this place where Muad'Dib had lived and walked and ruled. Someone called out from the landing, shouting at The Preacher's receding back in a voice which trembled with religious awe: "Is that Muad'Dib come back to us?"

  The Preacher stopped, reached into the purse beneath his bourka, and removed an object which only those nearby recognized. It was a desert-mummified human hand, one of the planet's jokes on mortality which occasionally turned up in the sand and were universally regarded as communications from Shai-Hulud. The hand had been desiccated into a tight fist which ended in white bone scarred by sandblast winds.

  "I bring the Hand of God, and that is all I bring!" The Preacher shouted. "I speak for the Hand of God. I am The Preacher."

  Some took him to mean that the hand was Muad'Dib's, but others fastened on that commanding presence and the terrible voice--and that was how Arrakis came to know his name. But it was not the last time his voice was heard.

  It is commonly reported, my dear Georad, that there exists great natural virtue in the melange experience. Perhaps this is true. There remain within me, however, profound doubts that every use of melange always brings virtue. Meseems that certain persons have corrupted the use of melange in defiance of God. In the words
of the Ecumenon, they have disfigured the soul. They skim the surface of melange and believe thereby to attain grace. They deride their fellows, do great harm to godliness, and they distort the meaning of this abundant gift maliciously, surely a mutilation beyond the power of man to restore. To be truly at one with the virtue of the spice, uncorrupted in all ways, full of goodly honor, a man must permit his deeds and his words to agree. When your actions describe a system of evil consequences, you should be judged by those consequences and not by your explanations. It is thus that we should judge Muad'Dib.

  --THE PEDANT HERESY

  It was a small room tinged with the odor of ozone and reduced to a shadowy greyness by dimmed glowglobes and the metallic blue light of a single transeye monitoring screen. The screen was about a meter wide and only two-thirds of a meter in height. It revealed in remote detail a barren, rocky valley with two Laza tigers feeding on the bloody remnants of a recent kill. On the hillside above the tigers could be seen a slender man in Sardaukar working uniform, Levenbrech insignia at his collar. He wore a servo-control keyboard against his chest.

  One veriform suspensor chair faced the screen, occupied by a fair-haired woman of indeterminate age. She had a heart-shaped face and slender hands which gripped the chair arms as she watched. The fullness of a white robe trimmed in gold concealed her figure. A pace to her right stood a blocky man dressed in the bronze and gold uniform of a Bashar Aide in the old Imperial Sardaukar. His greying hair had been closely cropped over square, emotionless features.

  The woman coughed, said: "It went as you predicted, Tyekanik."

  "Assuredly, Princess," the Bashar Aide said, his voice hoarse.

  She smiled at the tension in his voice, asked: "Tell me, Tyekanik, how will my son like the sound of Emperor Farad'n I?"

  "The title suits him, Princess."

  "That was not my question."

  "He might not approve some of the things done to gain him that, ahh, title."

  "Then again ..." She turned, peered up through the gloom at him. "You served my father well. It was not your fault that he lost the throne to the Atreides. But surely the sting of that loss must be felt as keenly by you as by any--"

  "Does the Princess Wensicia have some special task for me?" Tyekanik asked. His voice remained hoarse, but there was a sharp edge to it now.

  "You have a bad habit of interrupting me," she said.

  Now he smiled, displaying thick teeth which glistened in the light from the screen. "At times you remind me of your father," he said. "Always these circumlocutions before a request for a delicate ... ahh, assignment. "

  She jerked her gaze away from him to conceal anger, asked: "Do you really think those Lazas will put my son on the throne?"

  "It's distinctly possible, Princess. You must admit that the bastard get of Paul Atreides would be no more than juicy morsels for those two. And with those twins gone ..." He shrugged.

  "The grandson of Shaddam IV becomes the logical successor," she said. "That is if we can remove the objections of the Fremen, the Landsraad and CHOAM, not to mention any surviving Atreides who might--"

  "Javid assures me that his people can take care of Alia quite easily. I do not count the Lady Jessica as an Atreides. Who else remains?"

  "Landsraad and CHOAM will go where the profit goes," she said, "but what of the Fremen?"

  "We'll drown them in their Muad'Dib's religion!"

  "Easier said than done, my dear Tyekanik."

  "I see," he said. "We're back to that old argument."

  "House Corrino has done worse things to gain power," she said.

  "But to embrace this ... this Mahdi's religion!"

  "My son respects you," she said.

  "Princess, I long for the day when House Corrino returns to its rightful seat of power. So does every remaining Sardaukar here on Salusa. But if you--"

  "Tyekanik! This is the planet Salusa Secundus. Do not fall into the lazy ways which spread through our Imperium. Full name, complete title-- attention to every detail. Those attributes will send the Atreides lifeblood into the sands of Arrakis. Every detail, Tyekanik!"

  He knew what she was doing with this attack. It was part of the shifty trickiness she'd learned from her sister, Irulan. But he felt himself losing ground.

  "Do you hear me, Tyekanik?"

  "I hear, Princess."

  "I want you to embrace this Muad'Dib religion," she said.

  "Princess, I would walk into fire for you, but this ..."

  "That is an order, Tyekanik!"

  He swallowed, stared into the screen. The Laza tigers had finished feeding and now lay on the sand completing their toilet, long tongues moving across their forepaws.

  "An order, Tyekanik--do you understand me?"

  "I hear and obey, Princess." His voice did not change tone.

  She sighed. "Ohh, if my father were only alive ..."

  "Yes, Princess."

  "Don't mock me, Tyekanik. I know how distasteful this is to you. But if you set the example ..."

  "He may not follow, Princess."

  "He'll follow." She pointed at the screen. "It occurs to me that the Levenbrech out there could be a problem."

  "A problem? How is that?"

  "How many people know this thing of the tigers?"

  "That Levenbrech who is their trainer ... one transport pilot, you, and of course ..." He tapped his own chest.

  "What about the buyers?"

  "They know nothing. What is it you fear, Princess?"

  "My son is, well, sensitive."

  "Sardaukar do not reveal secrets," he said.

  "Neither do dead men." She reached forward and depressed a red key beneath the lighted screen.

  Immediately the Laza tigers raised their heads. They got to their feet and looked up the hill at the Levenbrech. Moving as one, they turned and began a scrambling run up the hillside.

  Appearing calm at first, the Levenbrech depressed a key on his console. His movements were assured but, as the cats continued their dash toward him, he became more frenzied, pressing the key harder and harder. A look of startled awareness came over his features and his hand jerked toward the working knife at his waist. The movement came too late. A raking claw hit his chest and sent him sprawling. As he fell, the other tiger took his neck in one great-fanged bite and shook him. His spine snapped.

  "Attention to detail," the Princess said. She turned, stiffened as Tyekanik drew his knife. But he presented the blade to her, handle foremost.

  "Perhaps you'd like to use my knife to attend to another detail," he said.

  "Put that back in its sheath and don't act the fool!" she raged. "Sometimes, Tyekanik, you try me to the--"

  "That was a good man out there, Princess. One of my best."

  "One of my best," she corrected him.

  He drew a deep, trembling breath, sheathed his knife. "And what of my transport pilot?"

  "This will be ascribed to an accident," she said. "You will advise him to employ the utmost caution when he brings those tigers back to us. And of course, when he has delivered our pets to Javid's people on the transport ..." She looked at his knife.

  "Is that an order, Princess?"

  "It is."

  "Shall I, then, fall on my knife, or will you take care of that, ahhh, detail? "

  She spoke with a false calm, her voice heavy: "Tyekanik, were I not absolutely convinced that you would fall on your knife at my command, you would not be standing here beside me--armed."

  He swallowed, stared at the screen. The tigers once more were feeding.

  She refused to look at the scene, continued to stare at Tyekanik as she said: "You will, as well, tell our buyers not to bring us any more matched pairs of children who fit the necessary description."

  "As you command, Princess."

  "Don't use that tone with me, Tyekanik."

  "Yes, Princess."

  Her lips drew into a straight line. Then: "How many more of those paired costumes do we have?"

  "Six sets of
the robes, complete with stillsuits and the sand shoes, all with the Atreides insignia worked into them."

  "Fabrics as rich as the ones on that pair?" she nodded toward the screen.

  "Fit for royalty, Princess."

  "Attention to detail," she said. "The garments will be dispatched to Arrakis as gifts for our royal cousins. They will be gifts from my son, do you understand me, Tyekanik?"

  "Completely, Princess."

  "Have him inscribe a suitable note. It should say that he sends these few paltry garments as tokens of his devotion to House Atreides. Something on that order."

  "And the occasion?"

  "There must be a birthday or holy day or something, Tyekanik. I leave that to you. I trust you, my friend."

  He stared at her silently.

  Her face hardened. "Surely you must know that? Who else can I trust since the death of my husband?"

  He shrugged, thinking how closely she emulated the spider. It would not do to get on intimate terms with her, as he now suspected his Levenbrech had done.