Dune Messiah

***

As he lay immersed in the screaming odor of the spice, staring inward through the oracular trance, Paul saw the moon become an elongated sphere. It rolled and twisted, hissing—the terrible hissing of a star being quenched in an infinite sea—down … down … down … like a ball thrown by a child.

It was gone.

This moon had not set. Realization engulfed him. It was gone: no moon. The earth quaked like an animal shaking its skin. Terror swept over him.

Paul jerked upright on his pallet, eyes wide open, staring. Part of him looked outward, part inward. Outwardly, he saw the plasmeld grillwork which vented his private room, and he knew he lay beside a stonelike abyss of his Keep. Inwardly, he continued to see the moon fall.

Out! Out!

His grillwork of plasmeld looked onto the blazing light of noon across Arrakeen. Inward—there lay blackest night. A shower of sweet odors from a garden roof nibbled at his senses, but no floral perfume could roll back that fallen moon.

Paul swung his feet to the cold surface of the floor, peered through the grillwork. He could see directly across to the gentle arc of a footbridge constructed of crystal-stabilized gold and platinum. Fire jewels from far Cedon decorated the bridge. It led to the galleries of the inner city across a pool and fountain filled with waterflowers. If he stood, Paul knew, he could look down into petals as clean and red as fresh blood whirling, turning there—disks of ambient color tossed on an emerald freshet.

His eyes absorbed the scene without pulling him from spice thrall dom.

That terrible vision of a lost moon.

The vision suggested a monstrous loss of individual security. Perhaps he’d seen his civilization fall, toppled by its own pretensions.

A moon … a moon … a falling moon.

It had taken a massive dose of the spice essence to penetrate the mud thrown up by the tarot. All it had shown him was a falling moon and the hateful way he’d known from the beginning. To buy an end for the Jihad, to silence the volcano of butchery, he must discredit himself.

Disengage … disengage … disengage …

Floral perfume from the garden roof reminded him of Chani. He longed for her arms now, for the clinging arms of love and forgetfulness. But even Chani could not exorcise this vision. What would Chani say if he went to her with the statement that he had a particular death in mind? Knowing it to be inevitable, why not choose an aristocrat’s death, ending life on a secret flourish, squandering any years that might have been? To die before coming to the end of willpower, was that not an aristocrat’s choice?

He stood, crossed to the lapped opening in the grillwork, went out onto a balcony which looked upward to flowers and vines trailing from the garden. His mouth held the dryness of a desert march.

Moon … moon—where is that moon?

He thought of Alia’s description, the young woman’s body found in the dunes. A Fremen addicted to semuta! Everything fitted the hateful pattern.

You do not take from this universe, he thought. It grants what it will.

The remains of a conch shell from the seas of Mother Earth lay on a low table beside the balcony rail. He took its lustrous smoothness into his hands, tried to feel backward in Time. The pearl surface reflected glittering moons of light. He tore his gaze from it, peered upward past the garden to a sky become a conflagration—trails of rainbow dust shining in the silver sun.

My Fremen call themselves “Children of the Moon,” he thought.

He put down the conch, strode along the balcony. Did that terrifying moon hold out hope of escape? He probed for meaning in the region of mystic communion. He felt weak, shaken, still gripped by the spice.

At the north end of his plasmeld chasm, he came in sight of the lower buildings of the government warren. Foot traffic thronged the roof walks. He felt that the people moved there like a frieze against a background of doors, walls, tile designs. The people were tiles! When he blinked, he could hold them frozen in his mind. A frieze.

A moon falls and is gone.

A feeling came over him that the city out there had been translated into an odd symbol for his universe. The buildings he could see had been erected on the plain where his Fremen had obliterated the Sardaukar legions. Ground once trampled by battles rang now to the rushing clamor of business.

Keeping to the balcony’s outer edge, Paul strode around the corner. Now, his vista was a suburb where city structures lost themselves in rocks and the blowing sand of the desert. Alia’s temple dominated the foreground; green and black hangings along its two-thousand-meter sides displayed the moon symbol of Muad’dib.

A falling moon.

Paul passed a hand across his forehead and eyes. The symbol-metropolis oppressed him. He despised his own thoughts. Such vacillation in another would have aroused his anger.

He loathed his city!

Rage rooted in boredom flickered and simmered deep within him, nurtured by decisions that couldn’t be avoided. He knew which path his feet must follow. He’d seen it enough times, hadn’t he? Seen it! Once … long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.

Paul stared out across the rooftops. What treasures of untrammeled life lay beneath those roofs? He glimpsed leaf-green places, open plantings amidst the chalk-red and gold of the roofs. Green, the gift of Muad’dib and his water. Orchards and groves lay within his view—open plantings to rival those of fabled Lebanon.

“Muad’dib spends water like a madman,” Fremen said.

Paul put his hands over his eyes.

The moon fell.

He dropped his hands, stared at his metropolis with clarified vision. Buildings took on an aura of monstrous imperial barbarity. They stood enormous and bright beneath the northern sun. Colossi! Every extravagance of architecture a demented history could produce lay within his view: terraces of mesa proportion, squares as large as some cities, parks, premises, bits of cultured wilderness.

Superb artistry abutted inexplicable prodigies of dismal tastless ness. Details impressed themselves upon him: a postern out of most ancient Baghdad … a dome dreamed in mythical Damascus … an arch from the low gravity of Atar … harmonious elevations and queer depths. All created an effect of unrivaled magnificence.

A moon! A moon! A moon!

Frustration tangled him. He felt the pressure of mass-unconscious, that burgeoning sweep of humankind across his universe. They rushed upon him with a force like a gigantic tidal bore. He sensed the vast migrations at work in human affairs: eddies, currents, gene flows. No dams of abstinence, no seizures of impotence nor maledictions could stop it.

Muad’dib’s Jihad was less than an eye-blink in this larger movement. The Bene Gesserit swimming in this tide, that corporate entity trading in genes, was trapped in the torrent as he was. Visions of a falling moon must be measured against other legends, other visions in a universe where even the seemingly eternal stars waned, flickered, died …

What mattered a single moon in such a universe?

Far within his fortress citadel, so deep within that the sound sometimes lost itself in the flow of city noises, a ten-string rebaba tinkled with a song of the Jihad, a lament for a woman left behind on Arrakis:

The song sickened him. A tune for stupid creatures lost in sentimentality! As well sing to the dune-impregnated corpse Alia had seen.

A figure moved in shadows of the balcony’s grillwork. Paul whirled.

The ghola emerged into the sun’s full glare. His metal eyes glittered.

“Is it Duncan Idaho or the man called Hayt?” Paul asked.

The ghola came to a stop two paces from him. “Which would my Lord prefer?”

The voice carried a soft ring of caution.

“Play the Zensunni,” Paul said bitterly. Meanings within meanings! What could a Zensunni philosopher say or do to change one jot of the reality unrolling before them at this instant?

“My Lord is troubled.”

Paul turned away, stared at the Shield Wall’s distant scarp, saw wind-carved arches and buttresses, terrible mimicry of his city. Nature playing a joke on him! See what I can build! He recognized a slash in the distant massif, a place where sand spilled from a crevasse, and thought: There! Right there, we fought Sardaukar!

“What troubles my lord?” the ghola asked.

“A vision,” Paul whispered.

“Ahhhhh, when the Tleilaxu first awakened me, I had visions. I was restless, lonely … not really knowing I was lonely. Not then. My visions revealed nothing! The Tleilaxu told me it was an intrusion of the flesh which men and gholas all suffer, a sickness, no more.”

Paul turned, studied the ghola’s eyes, those pitted, steely balls without expression. What visions did those eyes see?

“Duncan … Duncan …” Paul whispered.

“I am called Hayt.”

“I saw a moon fall,” Paul said. “It was gone, destroyed. I heard a great hissing. The earth shook.”

“You are drunk on too much time,” the ghola said.

“I ask for the Zensunni and get the mentat!” Paul said. “Very well! Play my vision through your logic, mentat. Analyze it and reduce it to mere words laid out for burial.”

“Burial, indeed,” the ghola said. “You run from death. You strain at the next instant, refuse to live here and now. Augury! What a crutch for an Emperor!”

Paul found himself fascinated by a well-remembered mole on the ghola’s chin.

“Trying to live in this future,” the ghola said, “do you give substance to such a future? Do you make it real?”

“If I go the way of my vision-future, I’ll be alive then,” Paul muttered. “What makes you think I want to live there?”

The ghola shrugged. “You asked me for a substantial answer.”

“Where is there substance in a universe composed of events?” Paul asked. “Is there a final answer? Doesn’t each solution produce new questions?”

“You’ve digested so much time you have delusions of immortality,” the ghola said. “Even your Empire, my lord, must live its time and die.”

“Don’t parade smoke-blackened altars before me,” Paul growled. “I’ve heard enough sad histories of gods and messiahs. Why should I need special powers to forecast ruins of my own like all those others? The lowliest servant of my kitchens could do this.” He shook his head. “The moon fell!”

“You’ve not brought your mind to rest at its beginning,” the ghola said.

“Is that how you destroy me?” Paul demanded. “Prevent me from collecting my thoughts?”

“Can you collect chaos?” the ghola asked. “We Zensunni say: ‘Not collecting, that is the ultimate gathering.’ What can you gather without gathering yourself?”

“I’m deviled by a vision and you spew nonsense!” Paul raged. “What do you know of prescience?”

“I’ve seen the oracle at work,” the ghola said. “I’ve seen those who seek signs and omens for their individual destiny. They fear what they seek.”

“My falling moon is real,” Paul whispered. He took a trembling breath. “It moves. It moves.”

“Men always fear things which move by themselves,” the ghola said. “You fear your own powers. Things fall into your head from nowhere. When they fall out, where do they go?”

“You comfort me with thorns,” Paul growled.

An inner illumination came over the ghola’s face. For a moment, he became pure Duncan Idaho. “I give you what comfort I can,” he said.

Paul wondered at that momentary spasm. Had the ghola felt grief which his mind rejected? Had Hayt put down a vision of his own?

“My moon has a name,” Paul whispered.

He let the vision flow over him then. Though his whole being shrieked, no sound escaped him. He was afraid to speak, fearful that his voice might betray him. The air of this terrifying future was thick with Chani’s absence. Flesh that had cried in ecstasy, eyes that had burned him with their desire, the voice that had charmed him because it played no tricks of subtle control—all gone, back into the water and the sand.

Slowly, Paul turned away, looked out at the present and the plaza before Alia’s temple. Three shaven-headed pilgrims entered from the processional avenue. They wore grimy yellow robes and hurried with their heads bent against the afternoon’s wind. One walked with a limp, dragging his left foot. They beat their way against the wind, rounded a corner and were gone from his sight.

Just as his moon would go, they were gone. Still, his vision lay before him. Its terrible purpose gave him no choice.

The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not … yet, I occurred.