Dune

  And there was no mistaking the victorious exultation in the Harkonnen gibberish that poured from the other bands. Sharp commands, battle reports. There wasn't enough of it for Jessica to register and break the language, but the tone was obvious.

  Harkonnen victory.

  Paul shook the pack beside him, hearing the two literjons of water gurgle there. He took a deep breath, looked up through the transparent end of the tent at the rock escarpment outlined against the stars. His left hand felt the sphincter-seal of the tent's entrance. "It'll be dawn soon," he said. "We can wait through the day for Idaho, but not through another night. In the desert, you must travel by night and rest in shade through the day."

  Remembered lore insinuated itself into Jessica's mind: Without a stillsuit, a man sitting in shade on the desert needs five liters of water a day to maintain body weight. She felt the slick-soft skin of the stillsuit against her body, thinking how their lives depended on these garments.

  "If we leave here, Idaho can't find us," she said.

  "There are ways to make any man talk," he said. "If Idaho hasn't returned by dawn, we must consider the possibility he has been captured. How long do you think he could hold out?"

  The question required no answer, and she sat in silence.

  Paul lifted the seal on the pack, pulled out a tiny micromanual with glowtab and magnifier. Green and orange letters leaped up at him from the pages: "literjons, stilltent, energy caps, recaths, sandsnork, binoculars, stillsuit repkit, baradye pistol, sinkchart, filt-plugs, paracompass, maker hooks, thumpers, Fremkit, fire pillar...."

  So many things for survival on the desert.

  Presently, he put the manual aside on the tent floor.

  "Where can we possibly go?" Jessica asked.

  "My father spoke of desert power," Paul said. "The Harkonnens cannot rule this planet without it. They've never ruled this planet, nor shall they. Not even with ten thousand legions of Sardaukar."

  "Paul, you can't think that--"

  "We've all the evidence in our hands," he said. "Right here in this tent--the tent itself, this pack and its contents, these stillsuits. We know the Guild wants a prohibitive price for weather satellites. We know that--"

  "What've weather satellites to do with it?" she asked. "They couldn't possibly...." She broke off.

  Paul sensed the hyperalertness of his mind reading her reactions, computing on minutiae. "You see it now," he said. "Satellites watch the terrain below. There are things in the deep desert that will not bear frequent inspection."

  "You're suggesting the Guild itself controls this planet?"

  She was so slow.

  "No!" he said. "The Fremen! They're paying the Guild for privacy, paying in a coin that's freely available to anyone with desert power-spice. This is more than a second-approximation answer; it's the straight-line computation. Depend on it."

  "Paul," Jessica said, "you're not a Mentat yet; you can't know for sure how--"

  "I'll never be a Mentat," he said. "I'm something else ... a freak."

  "Paul! How can you say such--"

  "Leave me alone!"

  He turned away from her, looking out into the night. Why can't I mourn? he wondered. He felt that every fiber of his being craved this release, but it would be denied him forever.

  Jessica had never heard such distress in her son's voice. She wanted to reach out to him, hold him, comfort him, help him--but she sensed there was nothing she could do. He had to solve this problem by himself.

  The glowing tab of the Fremkit manual between them on the tent floor caught her eye. She lifted it, glanced at the flyleaf, reading: "Manual of 'The Friendly Desert,' the place full of life. Here are the ayat and burhan of Life. Believe, and al-Lat shall never burn you."

  It reads like the Azhar Book, she thought, recalling her studies of the Great Secrets. Has a Manipulator of Religions been on Arrakis?

  Paul lifted the paracompass from the pack, returned it, said: "Think of all these special-application Fremen machines. They show unrivaled sophistication. Admit it. The culture that made these things betrays depths no one suspected."

  Hesitating, still worried by the harshness in his voice, Jessica returned to the book, studied an illustrated constellation from the Arrakeen sky: "Muad'Dib: The Mouse," and noted that the tail pointed north.

  Paul stared into the tent's darkness at the dimly discerned movements of his mother revealed by the manual's glowtab. Now is the time to carry out my father's wish, he thought. I must give her his message now while she has time for grief. Grief would inconvenience us later. And he found himself shocked by precise logic.

  "Mother," he said.

  "Yes?"

  She heard the change in his voice, felt coldness in her entrails at the sound. Never had she heard such harsh control.

  "My father is dead," he said.

  She searched within herself for the coupling of fact and fact and fact--the Bene Gesserit way of assessing data--and it came to her: the sensation of terrifying loss.

  Jessica nodded, unable to speak.

  "My father charged me once," Paul said, "to give you a message if anything happened to him. He feared you might believe he distrusted you."

  That useless suspicion, she thought.

  "He wanted you to know he never suspected you," Paul said, and explained the deception, adding: "He wanted you to know he always trusted you completely, always loved you and cherished you. He said he would sooner have mistrusted himself and he had but one regret--that he never made you his Duchess."

  She brushed the tears coursing down her cheeks, thought: What a stupid waste of the body's water! But she knew this thought for what it was--the attempt to retreat from grief into anger. Leto, my Leto, she thought. What terrible things we do to those we love! With a violent motion, she extinguished the little manual's glowtab.

  Sobs shook her.

  Paul heard his mother's grief and felt the emptiness within himself. I have no grief, he thought. Why? Why? He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.

  "A time to get and time to lose, " Jessica thought, quoting to herself from the O.C. Bible. "A time to keep and a time to cast away; a time for love and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace. "

  Paul's mind had gone on in its chilling precision. He saw the avenues ahead of them on this hostile planet. Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery--as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.

  Abruptly, as though he had found a necessary key, Paul's mind climbed another notch in awareness. He felt himself clinging to this new level, clutching at a precarious hold and peering about. It was as though he existed within a globe with avenues radiating away in all directions ... yet this only approximated the sensation.

  He remembered once seeing a gauze kerchief blowing in the wind and now he sensed the future as though it twisted across some surface as undulant and impermanent as that of the windblown kerchief.

  He saw people.

  He felt the heat and cold of uncounted probabilities.

  He knew names and places, experienced emotions without number, reviewed data of innumerable unexplored crannies. There was time to probe and test and taste, but no time to shape.

  The thing was a spectrum of possibilities from the most remote past to the most remote future--from the most probable to the most improbable. He saw his own death in countless ways. He saw new planets, new cultures.

  People.

  People.

  He saw them in such swarms they could not be listed, yet his mind catalogued them.

  Even the Guildsmen.

  And he thought: The Guild-there'd be a way for us, my strangeness accepted as a familiar thing of high value, always with an assured supply of the now-necessary spice.

  But the idea of living out his life in the mind-groping-ahead-through-possible-futures that guided hurt
ling spaceships appalled him. It was a way, though. And in meeting the possible future that contained Guildsmen he recognized his own strangeness.

  I have another kind of sight. I see another kind of terrain: the available paths.

  The awareness conveyed both reassurance and alarm--so many places on that other kind of terrain dipped or turned out of his sight.

  As swiftly as it had come, the sensation slipped away from him, and he realized the entire experience had taken the space of a heartbeat.

  Yet, his own personal awareness had been turned over, illuminated in a terrifying way. He stared around him.

  Night still covered the stilltent within its rock-enclosed hideaway. His mother's grief could still be heard.

  His own lack of grief could still be felt ... that hollow place somewhere separated from his mind, which went on in its steady pace--dealing with data, evaluating, computing, submitting answers in something like the Mentat way.

  And now he saw that he had a wealth of data few such minds ever before had encompassed. But this made the empty place within him no easier to bear. He felt that something must shatter. It was as though a clockwork control for a bomb had been set to ticking within him. It went on about its business no matter what he wanted. It recorded minuscule shadings of difference around him--a slight change in moisture, a fractional fall in temperature, the progress of an insect across their stilltent roof, the solemn approach of dawn in the starlighted patch of sky he could see out the tent's transparent end.

  The emptiness was unbearable. Knowing how the clockwork had been set in motion made no difference. He could look to his own past and see the start of it--the training, the sharpening of talents, the refined pressures of sophisticated disciplines, even exposure to the O.C. Bible at a critical moment ... and, lastly, the heavy intake of spice. And he could look ahead--the most terrifying direction--to see where it all pointed.

  I'm a monster! he thought. A freak!

  "No," he said. Then: "No. No! NO!"

  He found that he was pounding the tent floor with his fists. (The implacable part of him recorded this as an interesting emotional datum and fed it into computation.)

  "Paul!"

  His mother was beside him, holding his hands, her face a gray blob peering at him. "Paul, what's wrong?"

  "You!" he said.

  "I'm here, Paul," she said. "It's all right."

  "What have you done to me?" he demanded.

  In a burst of clarity, she sensed some of the roots in the question, said: "I gave birth to you."

  It was, from instinct as much as her own subtle knowledge, the precisely correct answer to calm him. He felt her hands holding him, focused on the dim outline of her face. (Certain gene traces in her facial structure were noted in the new way by his onflowing mind, the clues added to other data, and a final-summation answer put forward.)

  "Let go of me," he said.

  She heard the iron in his voice, obeyed. "Do you want to tell me what's wrong, Paul?"

  "Did you know what you were doing when you trained me?" he asked.

  There's no more childhood in his voice, she thought. And she said: "I hoped the thing any parent hopes--that you'd be ... superior, different."

  "Different?"

  She heard the bitterness in his tone, said: "Paul, I--"

  "You didn't want a son!" he said. "You wanted a Kwisatz Haderach! You wanted a male Bene Gesserit!"

  She recoiled from his bitterness. "But Paul...."

  "Did you ever consult my father in this?"

  She spoke gently out of the freshness of her grief: "Whatever you are, Paul, the heredity is as much your father as me."

  "But not the training," he said. "Not the things that... awakened ... the sleeper."

  "Sleeper?"

  "It's here." He put a hand to his head and then to his breast. "In me. It goes on and on and on and or. and--"

  "Paul!"

  She had heard the hysteria edging his voice.

  "Listen to me," he said. "You wanted the Reverend Mother to hear about my dreams: You listen in her place now. I've just had a waking dream. Do you know why?"

  "You must calm yourself," she said. "If there's--"

  "The spice," he said. "It's in everything here--the air, the soil, the food, the geriatric spice. It's like the Truthsayer drug. It's a poison!"

  She stiffened.

  His voice lowered and he repeated: "A poison--so subtle, so insidious ... so irreversible. It won't even kill you unless you stop taking it. We can't leave Arrakis unless we take part of Arrakis with us."

  The terrifying presence of his voice brooked no dispute.

  "You and the spice," Paul said. "The spice changes anyone who gets this much of it, but thanks to you, I could bring the change to consciousness. I don't get to leave it in the unconscious where its disturbance can be blanked out. I can see it."

  "Paul, you--"

  "I see it!" he repeated.

  She heard madness in his voice, didn't know what to do.

  But he spoke again, and she heard the iron control return to him: "We're trapped here."

  We're trapped here, she agreed.

  And she accepted the truth of his words. No pressure of the Bene Gesserit, no trickery or artifice could pry them completely free from Arrakis: the spice was addictive. Her body had known the fact long before her mind awakened to it.

  So here we live out our lives, she thought, on this hell-planet. The place is prepared for us, if we can evade the Harkonnens. And there's no doubt of my course: a broodmare preserving an important bloodline for the Bene Gesserit Plan.

  "I must tell you about my waking dream," Paul said. (Now there was fury in his voice.) "To be sure you accept what I say, I'll tell you first I know you'll bear a daughter, my sister, here on Arrakis."

  Jessica placed her hands against the tent floor, pressed back against the curving fabric wall to still a pang of fear. She knew her pregnancy could not show yet. Only her own Bene Gesserit training had allowed her to read the first faint signals of her body, to know of the embryo only a few weeks old.

  "Only to serve," Jessica whispered, clinging to the Bene Gesserit motto. "We exist only to serve."

  "We'll find a home among the Fremen," Paul said, "where your Missionaria Protectiva has bought us a bolt hole."

  They'veprepared a way jor us in the desert, Jessica told herself. But how can he know of the Missionaria Protectiva? She found it increasingly difficult to subdue her terror at the overpowering strangeness in Paul.

  He studied the dark shadow of her, seeing her fear and every reaction with his new awareness as though she were outlined in blinding light. A beginning of compassion for her crept over him.

  "The things that can happen here, I cannot begin to tell you," he said. "I cannot even begin to tell myself, although I've seen them. This sense of the future--I seem to have no control over it. The thing just happens. The immediate future--say, a year--I can see some of that... a road as broad as our Central Avenue on Caladan. Some places I don't see ... shadowed places... as though it went behind a hill" (and again he thought of the surface of a blowing kerchief) and there are branchings...."

  He fell silent as memory of that seeing filled him. No prescient dream, no experience of his life had quite prepared him for the totality with which the veils had been ripped away to reveal naked time.

  Recalling the experience, he recognized his own terrible purpose --the pressure of his life spreading outward like an expanding bubble ... time retreating before it....

  Jessica found the tent's glowtab control, activated it.

  Dim green light drove back the shadows, easing her fear. She looked at Paul's face, his eyes--the inward stare. And she knew where she had seen such a look before: pictured in records of disasters--on the faces of children who experienced starvation or terrible injury. The eyes were like pits, mouth a straight line, cheeks indrawn.

  It's the look of terrible awareness, she thought, of someone forced to the knowledge of his own mortal
ity.

  He was, indeed, no longer a child.

  The underlying import of his words began to take over in her mind, pushing all else aside. Paul could see ahead, a way of escape for them.

  "There's a way to evade the Harkonnens," she said.

  "The Harkonnens!" he sneered. "Put those twisted humans out of your mind." He stared at his mother, studying the lines of her face in the light of the glowtab. The lines betrayed her.

  She said: "You shouldn't refer to people as humans without--"

  "Don't be so sure you know where to draw the line," he said. "We carry our past with us. And, mother mine, there's a thing you don't know and should--we are Harkonnens."

  Her mind did a terrifying thing: it blanked out as though it needed to shut off all sensation. But Paul's voice went on at that implacable pace, dragging her with it.

  "When next you find a mirror, study your face--study mine now. The traces are there if you don't blind yourself. Look at my hands, the set of my bones. And if none of this convinces you, then take my word for it. I've walked the future, I've looked at a record, I've seen a place, I have all the data. We're Harkonnens."

  "A ... renegade branch of the family," she said. "That's it, isn't it? Some Harkonnen cousin who--"

  "You're the Baron's own daughter," he said, and watched the way she pressed her hands to her mouth. "The Baron sampled many pleasures in his youth, and once permitted himself to be seduced. But it was for the genetic purposes of the Bene Gesserit, by one of you."

  The way he said you struck her like a slap. But it set her mind to working and she could not deny his words. So many blank ends of meaning in her past reached out now and linked. The daughter the Bene Gesserit wanted--it wasn't to end the old Atreides-Harkonnen feud, but to fix some genetic factor in their lines. What? She groped for an answer.

  As though he saw inside her mind, Paul said: "They thought they were reaching for me. But I'm not what they expected, and I've arrived before my time. And they don't know it."

  Jessica pressed her hands to her mouth.

  Great Mother! He's the Kwisatz Haderach!

  She felt exposed and naked before him, realizing then that he saw her with eyes from which little could be hidden. And that, she knew, was the basis of her fear.

  "You're thinking I'm the Kwisatz Haderach," he said. "Put that out of your mind. I'm something unexpected."