a puzzled frown. "What of Count Fenring?"
"At my nephew's birthday several years ago," the Baron said. "This Imperial popinjay, Count Fenring, came as official observer and to ... ah, conclude a business arrangement between the Emperor and myself."
"So?"
"I ... ah, during one of our conversations, I believe I said something about making a prison planet of Arrakis. Fenring--"
"What did you say exactly?" Hawat asked.
"Exactly? That was quite a while ago and--"
"My Lord Baron, if you wish to make the best use of my services, you must give me adequate information. Wasn't this conversation recorded ?"
The Baron's face darkened with anger. "You're as bad as Piter! I don't like these--"
"Piter is no longer with you, my Lord," Hawat said. "As to that, whatever did happen to Piter?"
"He became too familiar, too demanding of me," the Baron said.
"You assure me you don't waste a useful man," Hawat said. "Will you waste me by threats and quibbling? We were discussing what you said to Count Fenring."
Slowly, the Baron composed his features. When the time comes, he thought, I'll remember his manner with me. Yes. I will remember.
"One moment," the Baron said, and he thought back to the meeting in his great hall. It helped to visualize the cone of silence in which they had stood. "I said something like this," the Baron said. " 'The Emperor knows a certain amount of killing has always been an arm of business.' I was referring to our work force losses. Then I said something about considering another solution to the Arrakeen problem and I said the Emperor's prison planet inspired me to emulate him."
"Witch blood!" Hawat snapped. "What did Fenring say?"
"That's when he began questioning me about you."
Hawat sat back, closed his eyes in thought. "So that's why they started looking into Arrakis," he said. "Well, the thing's done." He opened his eyes. "They must have spies all over Arrakis by now. Two years!"
"But certainly my innocent suggestion that--"
"Nothing is innocent in an Emperor's eyes! What were your instructions to Rabban?"
"Merely that he should teach Arrakis to fear us."
Hawat shook his head. "You now have two alternatives, Baron. You can kill off the natives, wipe them out entirely, or--"
"Waste an entire work force?"
"Would you prefer to have the Emperor and those Great Houses he can still swing behind him come in here and perform a curettement, scrape out Giedi Prime like a hollow gourd?"
The Baron studied his Mentat, then: "He wouldn't dare!"
"Wouldn't he?"
The Baron's lips quivered. "What is your alternative?"
"Abandon your dear nephew, Rabban."
"Aband ...." The Baron broke off, stared at Hawat.
"Send him no more troops, no aid of any kind. Don't answer his messages other than to say you're heard of the terrible way he's handled things on Arrakis and you intend to take corrective measures as soon as you're able. I'll arrange to have some of your messages intercepted by Imperial spies."
"But what of the spice, the revenues, the--"
"Demand your baronial profits, but be careful how you make your demands. Require fixed sums of Rabban. We can--"
The Baron turned his hands palms up. "But how can I be certain that my weasel nephew isn't--"
"We still have our spies on Arrakis. Tell Rabban he either meets the spice quotas you set him or he'll be replaced."
"I know my nephew," the Baron said. "This would only make him oppress the population even more."
"Of course he will!" Hawat snapped. "You don't want that stopped now! You merely want your own hands clean. Let Rabban make your Salusa Secundus for you. There's no need even to send him any prisoners. He has all the population required. If Rabban is driving his people to meet your spice quotas, then the Emperor need suspect no other motive. That's reason enough for putting the planet on the rack. And you, Baron, will not show by word or action that there's any other reason for this."
The Baron could not keep the sly tone of admiration out of his voice. "Ah, Hawat, you are a devious one. Now, how do we move into Arrakis and make use of what Rabban prepares?"
"That's the simplest thing of all, Baron. If you set each year's quota a bit higher than the one before, matters will soon reach a head there. Production will drop off. You can remove Rabban and take over yourself... to correct the mess."
"It fits," the Baron said. "But I can feel myself tiring of all this. I'm preparing another to take over Arrakis for me."
Hawat studied the fat round face across from him. Slowly the old soldier-spy began to nod his head. "Feyd-Rautha," he said. "So that's the reason for the oppression now. You're very devious yourself, Baron. Perhaps we can incorporate these two schemes. Yes. Your Feyd-Rautha can go to Arrakis as their savior. He can win the populace. Yes."
The Baron smiled. And behind his smile, he asked himself: Now, how does this fit in with Hawat's personal scheming?
And Hawat, seeing that he was dismissed, arose and left the red-walled room. As he walked, he could not put down the disturbing unknowns that cropped into every computation about Arrakis. This new religious leader that Gurney Halleck hinted at from his hiding place among the smugglers, this Muad'Dib.
Perhaps I should not have told the Baron to let this religion flourish where it will, even among the folk of pan and graben, he told himself. But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.
And he thought about Halleck's reports on Fremen battle tactics. The tactics smacked of Halleck himself... and Idaho... and even of Hawat.
Did Idaho survive? he asked himself.
But this was a futile question. He did not yet ask himself if it was possible that Paul had survived. He knew the Baron was convinced that all Atreides were dead. The Bene Gesserit witch had been his weapon, the Baron admitted. And that could only mean an end to all--even to the woman's own son.
What a poisonous hate she must've had for the Atreides, he thought. Something like the hate I hold for this Baron. Will my blow be as final and complete as hers?
There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace--those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.
--from "The Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
PAUL-MUAD'DIB remembered that there had been a meal heavy with spice essence. He clung to this memory because it was an anchor point and he could tell himself from this vantage that his immediate experience must be a dream.
I am a theater of processes, he told himself. I am a prey to the imperfect vision, to the race consciousness and its terrible purpose.
Yet, he could not escape the fear that he had somehow overrun himself, lost his position in time, so that past and future and present mingled without distinction. It was a kind of visual fatigue and it came, he knew, from the constant necessity of holding the prescient future as a kind of memory that was in itself a thing intrinsically of the past.
Chani prepared the meal forme, he told himself.
Yet Chani was deep in the south--in the cold country where the sun was hot--secreted in one of the new sietch strongholds, safe with their son, Leto II.
Or, was that a thing yet to happen?
No, he reassured himself, for Alia-the-Strange-One, his sister, had gone there with his mother and with Chani--a twenty-thumper trip into the south, riding a Reverend Mother's palanquin fixed to the back of a wild maker.
He shied away from the thought of riding the giant worms, asking himself: Or is Alia yet to be born?
I was on razzia, Paul recalled. We went raiding to recover the water of our dead in Arrakeen. And I found the remains of my father in the funeral pyre. I enshrined the skull of my father in a Fremen rock mound overlooking Harg Pass.
Or was that a thing yet to be?
My wounds are real, Paul told himself. My scars are real. The shrine of my father's skull is real.
Still in the dreamlike state, Paul remembered that Harah, Jamis' wife, had intruded on him once to say there'd been a fight in the sietch corridor. That had been the interim sietch before the women and children had been sent into the deep south. Harah had stood there in the entrance to the inner chamber, the black wings of her hair tied back by water rings on a chain. She had held aside the chamber's hangings and told him that Chani had just killed someone.
This happened, Paul told himself. This was real, not born out of its time and subject to change.
Paul remembered he had rushed out to find Chani standing beneath the yellow globes of the corridor, clad in a brilliant blue wraparound robe with hood thrown back, a flush of exertion on her elfin features. She had been sheathing her crysknife. A huddled group had been hurrying away down the corridor with a burden.
And Paul remembered telling himself: You always know when they're carrying a body.
Chani's water rings, worn openly in sietch on a cord around her neck, tinkled as she turned toward him.
"Chani, what is this?" he asked.
"I dispatched one who came to challenge you in single combat, Usul."
"You killed him?"
"Yes. But perhaps I should've left him for Harah."
(And Paul recalled how the faces of the people around them had showed appreciation for these words. Even Harah had laughed.)
"But he came to challenge me!"
"You trained me yourself in the weirding way, Usul."
"Certainly! But you shouldn't--"
"I was born in the desert, Usul. I know how to use a crysknife."
He suppressed his anger, tried to talk reasonably. "This may all be true, Chani, but--"
"I am no longer a child hunting scorpions in the sietch by the light of a handglobe, Usul. I do not play games."
Paul glared at her, caught by the odd ferocity beneath her casual attitude.
"He was not worthy, Usul," Chani said. "I'd not disturb your meditations with the likes of him." She moved closer, looking at him out of the corners of her eyes, dropping her voice so that only he might hear. "And, beloved, when it's learned that a challenger may face me and be brought to shameful death by Muad'Dib's woman, there'll be fewer challengers."
Yes, Paul told himself, that had certainly happened. It was true-past. And the number of challengers testing the new blade of Muad'Dib did drop dramatically.
Somewhere, in a world not-of-the-dream, there was a hint of motion, the cry of a nightbird.
I dream, Paul reassured himself. It's the spice meal.
Still, there was about him a feeling of abandonment. He wondered if it might be possible that his ruh-spirit had slipped over somehow into the world where the Fremen believed he had his true existence--into the alam al-mithal, the world of similitudes, that metaphysical realm where all physical limitations were removed. And he knew fear at the thought of such a place, because removal of all limitations meant removal of all points of reference. In the landscape of a myth he could not orient himself and say: "I am I because I am here."
His mother had said once: "The people are divided, some of them, in how they think of you."
I must be waking from the dream, Paul told himself. For this had happened--these words from his mother, the Lady Jessica who was now a Reverend Mother of the Fremen, these words had passed through reality.
Jessica was fearful of the religious relationship between himself and the Fremen, Paul knew. She didn't like the fact that people of both sietch and graben referred to Muad'Dib as Him. And she went questioning among the tribes, sending out her Sayyadina spies, collecting their answers and brooding on them.
She had quoted a Bene Gesserit proverb to him: "When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement become headlong--faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late."
Paul recalled that he had sat there in his mother's quarters, in the inner chamber shrouded by dark hangings with their surfaces covered by woven patterns out of Fremen mythology. He had sat there, hearing her out, noting the way she was always observing--even when her eyes were lowered. Her oval face had new lines in it at the corners of the mouth, but the hair was still like polished bronze. The wide-set green eyes, though, hid beneath their overcasting of spice-imbued blue.
"The Fremen have a simple, practical religion," he said.
"Nothing about religion is simple," she warned.
But Paul, seeing the clouded future that still hung over them, found himself swayed by anger. He could only say: "Religion unifies our forces. It's our mystique."
"You deliberately cultivate this air, this bravura," she charged. "You never cease indoctrinating."
"Thus you yourself taught me," he said.
But she had been full of contentions and arguments that day. It had been the day of the circumcision ceremony for little Leto. Paul had understood some of the reasons for her upset. She had never accepted his liaison--the "marriage of youth"--with Chani. But Chani had produced an Atreides son, and Jessica had found herself unable to reject the child with the mother.
Jessica had stirred finally under his stare, said: "You think me an unnatural mother."
"Of course not."
"I see the way you watch me when I'm with your sister. You don't understand about your sister."
"I know why Alia is different," he said. "She was unborn, part of you, when you changed the Water of Life. She--"
"You know nothing of it!"
And Paul, suddenly unable to express the knowledge gained out of its time, said only: "I don't think you unnatural."
She saw his distress, said: "There is a thing, Son."
"Yes?"
"I do love your Chani. I accept her."
This was real, Paul told himself. This wasn't the imperfect vision to be changed by the twistings out of time's own birth.
The reassurance gave him a new hold on his world. Bits of solid reality began to dip through the dream state into his awareness. He knew suddenly that he was in a hiereg, a desert camp. Chani had planted their stilltent on flour-sand for its softness. That could only mean Chani was near by--Chani, his soul, Chani his sihaya, sweet as the desert spring, Chani up from the palmaries of the deep south.
Now, he remembered her singing a sand chanty to him in the time for sleep.
"O my soul,
Have no taste for Paradise this night,
And I swear by Shai-hulud
You will go there,
Obedient to my love."
And she had sung the walking song lovers shared on the sand, its rhythm like the drag of the dunes against the feet: "Tell me of thine eyes
And I will tell thee of thy heart.
Tell me of thy feet
And I will tell thee of thy hands.
Tell me of thy sleeping
And I will tell thee of thy waking.
Tell me of thy desires
And I will tell thee of thy need."
He had heard someone strumming a baliset in another tent. And he'd thought then of Gurney Halleck. Reminded by the familiar instrument, he had thought of Gurney whose face he had seen in a smuggler band, but who had not seen him, could not see him or know of him lest that inadvertently lead the Harkonnens to the son of the Duke they had killed.
But the style of the player in the night, the distinctiveness of the fingers on the baliset's strings, brought the real musician back to Paul's memory. It had been Chatt the Leaper, captain of the Fedaykin, leader of the death commandos who guarded Muad'Dib.
We are in the desert, Paul remembered. We are in the central erg beyond the Harkonnen patrols. I am here to walk the sand, to lure a maker and mount him by my own cunning that I may be a Fremen entire.
He felt now the maula pistol at his belt, the crysknife. He felt the silence surrounding him.
It was that special pre-morning silence when the nightbirds had gone and the day creatures had not yet signaled their alertness to their enemy, the sun.
"You must ride the sand in the light of day that Shai-hulud shall see and know you have no fear," Stilgar had said. "Thus we turn our time around and set ourselves to sleep this night."
Quietly, Paul sat up, feeling the looseness of a slacked stillsuit around his body, the shadowed stilltent beyond. So softly he moved, yet Chani heard him.
She spoke from the tent's gloom, another shadow there: "It's not yet full light, beloved."
"Sihaya," he said, speaking with half a laugh in his voice.
"You call me your desert spring," she said, "but this day I'm thy goad. I am the Sayyadina who watches that the rites be obeyed."
He began tightening his stillsuit. "You told me once the words of the Kitab al-Ibar," he said. "You told me: "Woman is thy field; go then to thy field and till it.'"
"I am the mother of thy firstborn," she agreed.
He saw her in the grayness matching him movement for movement, securing her stillsuit for the open desert. "You should get all the rest you can," she said.
He recognized her love for him speaking then and chided her gently: "The Sayyadina of the Watch does not caution or warn the candidate."
She slid across to his side, touched his cheek with her palm. "Today, I am both the watcher and the woman."
"You should've left this duty to another," he said.
"Waiting is bad enough at best," she said. "I'd sooner be at thy side."
He kissed her palm before securing the faceflap of his suit, then turned and cracked the seal of the tent. The air that came in to them held the chill not-quite-dryness that would precipitate trace dew in the dawn. With it came the smell of a pre-spice mass, the mass they had detected off to the northeast, and that told them there would be a maker near by.
Paul crawled through the sphincter opening, stood on the sand and stretched the sleep from his muscles. A faint green-pearl luminescence et