Dune

***

“Now HARKONNEN shall kill Harkonnen,” Paul whispered.

He had awakened shortly before nightfall, sitting up in the sealed and darkened stilltent. As he spoke, he heard the vague stirrings of his mother where she slept against the tent’s opposite wall.

Paul glanced at the proximity detector on the floor, studying the dials illuminated in the blackness by phosphor tubes.

“It should be night soon,” his mother said. “Why don’t you lift the tent shades?”

Paul realized then that her breathing had been different for some time, that she had lain silent in the darkness until certain he was awake.

“Lifting the shades wouldn’t help,” he said. “There’s been a storm. The tent’s covered by sand. I’ll dig us out soon.”

“No sign of Duncan yet?”

“None.”

Paul rubbed absently at the ducal signet on his thumb, and a sudden rage against the very substance of this planet which had helped kill his father set him trembling.

“I heard the storm begin,” Jessica said.

The undemanding emptiness of her words helped restore some of his calm. His mind focused on the storm as he had seen it begin through the transparent end of their stilltent—cold dribbles of sand crossing the basin, then runnels and tails furrowing the sky. He had looked up to a rock spire, seen it change shape under the blast, becoming a low, Cheddar-colored wedge. Sand funneled into their basin had shadowed the sky with dull curry, then blotted out all light as the tent was covered.

Tent bows had creaked once as they accepted the pressure, then—silence broken only by the dim bellows wheezing of their sand snorkel pumping air from the surface.

“Try the receiver again,” Jessica said.

“No use,” he said.

He found his stillsuit’s watertube in its clip at his neck, drew a warm swallow into his mouth, and he thought that here he truly began an Arrakeen existence—living on reclaimed moisture from his own breath and body. It was flat and tasteless water, but it soothed his throat.

Jessica heard Paul drinking, felt the slickness of her own stillsuit clinging to her body, but she refused to accept her thirst. To accept it would require awakening fully into the terrible necessities of Arrakis where they must guard even fractional traces of moisture, hoarding the few drops in the tent’s catchpockets, begrudging a breath wasted on the open air.

So much easier to drift back down into sleep.

But there had been a dream in this day’s sleep, and she shivered at memory of it. She had held dreaming hands beneath sandflow where a name had been written: Duke Leto Atreides. The name had blurred with the sand and she had moved to restore it, but the first letter filled before the last was begun.

The sand would not stop.

Her dream became wailing: louder and louder. That ridiculous wailing—part of her mind had realized the sound was her own voice as a tiny child, little more than a baby. A woman not quite visible to memory was going away.

My unknown mother, Jessica thought. The Bene Gesserit who bore me and gave me to the Sisters because that’s what she was commanded to do. Was she glad to rid herself of a Harkonnen child?

“The place to hit them is in the spice,” Paul said.

How can he think of attack at a time like this? she asked herself.

“An entire planet full of spice,” she said. “How can you hit them there?”

She heard him stirring, the sound of their pack being dragged across the tent floor.

“It was sea power and air power on Caladan,” he said. “Here, it’s desert power. The Fremen are the key.”

His voice came from the vicinity of the tent’s sphincter. Her Bene Gesserit training sensed in his tone an unresolved bitterness toward her.

All his life he has been trained to hate Harkonnens, she thought. Now, he finds he is Harkonnen … because of me. How little he knows me! I was my Duke’s only woman. I accepted his life and his values even to defying my Bene Gesserit orders.

The tent’s glowtab came alight under Paul’s hand, filled the domed area with green radiance. Paul crouched at the sphincter, his stillsuit hood adjusted for the open desert—forehead capped, mouth filter in place, nose plugs adjusted. Only his dark eyes were visible: a narrow band of face that turned once toward her and away.

“Secure yourself for the open,” he said, and his voice was blurred behind the filter.

Jessica pulled the filter across her mouth, began adjusting her hood as she watched Paul break the tent seal.

Sand rasped as he opened the sphincter and a burred fizzle of grains ran into the tent before he could immobilize it with a static compaction tool. A hole grew in the sandwall as the tool realigned the grains. He slipped out and her ears followed his progress to the surface.

What will we find out there? she wondered. Harkonnen troops and the Sardaukar, those are dangers we can expect. But what of the dangers we don’t know?

She thought of the compaction tool and the other strange instruments in the pack. Each of these tools suddenly stood in her mind as a sign of mysterious dangers.

She felt then a hot breeze from surface sand touch her cheeks where they were exposed above the filter.

“Pass up the pack.” It was Paul’s voice, low and guarded.

She moved to obey, heard the water literjons gurgle as she shoved the pack across the floor. She peered upward, saw Paul framed against stars.

“Here,” he said and reached down, pulled the pack to the surface.

Now she saw only the circle of stars. They were like the luminous tips of weapons aimed down at her. A shower of meteors crossed her patch of night. The meteors seemed to her like a warning, like tiger stripes, like luminous grave slats clabbering her blood. And she felt the chill of the price on their heads.

“Hurry up,” Paul said. “I want to collapse the tent.”

A shower of sand from the surface brushed her left hand. How much sand will the hand hold? she asked herself.

“Shall I help you?” Paul asked.

“No.”

She swallowed in a dry throat, slipped into the hole, felt static-packed sand rasp under her hands. Paul reached down, took her arm. She stood beside him on a smooth patch of starlit desert, stared around. Sand almost brimmed their basin, leaving only a dim lip of surrounding rock. She probed the farther darkness with her trained senses.

Noise of small animals.

Birds.

A fall of dislodged sand and faint creature sounds within it.

Paul collapsing their tent, recovering it up the hole.

Starlight displaced just enough of the night to charge each shadow with menace. She looked at patches of blackness.

Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.

Presently, Paul stood beside her, said: “Duncan told me that if he was captured, he could hold out… this long. We must leave here now.” He shouldered the pack, crossed to the shallow lip of the basin, climbed to a ledge that looked down on open desert.

Jessica followed automatically, noting how she now lived in her son’s orbit.

For now is my grief heavier than the sands of the seas, she thought. This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow’s life. I live now for my young Duke and the daughter yet to be.

She felt the sand drag her feet as she climbed to Paul’s side.

He looked north across a line of rocks, studying a distant escarpment.

The faraway rock profile was like an ancient battleship of the seas outlined by stars. The long swish of it lifted on an invisible wave with syllables of boomerang antennae, funnels arcing back, a pi-shaped upthrusting at the stern.

An orange glare burst above the silhouette and a line of brilliant purple cut downward toward the glare.

Another line of purple!

And another upthrusting orange glare!

It was like an ancient naval battle, remembered shellfire, and the sight held them staring.

“Pillars of fire,” Paul whispered.

A ring of red eyes lifted over the distant rock. Lines of purple laced the sky.

“Jetflares and lasguns,” Jessica said.

The dust-reddened first moon of Arrakis lifted above the horizon to their left and they saw a storm trail there—a ribbon of movement over the desert.

“It must be Harkonnen ’thopters hunting us,” Paul said. “The way they’re cutting up the desert… it’s as though they were making certain they stamped out whatever’s there… the way you’d stamp out a nest of insects.”

“Or a nest of Atreides,” Jessica said.

“We must seek cover,” Paul said. “We’ll head south and keep to the rocks. If they caught us in the open….” He turned, adjusting the pack to his shoulders. “They’re killing anything that moves.”

He took one step along the ledge and, in that instant, heard the low hiss of gliding aircraft, saw the dark shapes of ornithopters above them.

***

“I’VE ALWAYS prided myself on seeing things the way they truly are,” Thufir Hawat said. “That’s the curse of being a Mentat. You can’t stop analyzing your data.”

The leathered old face appeared composed in the predawn dimness as he spoke. His sapho-stained lips were drawn into a straight line with radial creases spreading upward.

A robed man squatted silently on sand across from Hawat, apparently unmoved by the words.

The two crouched beneath a rock overhang that looked down on a wide, shallow sink. Dawn was spreading over the shattered outline of cliffs across the basin, touching everything with pink. It was cold under the overhang, a dry and penetrating chill left over from the night. There had been a warm wind just before dawn, but now it was cold. Hawat could hear teeth chattering behind him among the few troopers remaining in his force.

The man squatting across from Hawat was a Fremen who had come across the sink in the first light of false dawn, skittering over the sand, blending into the dunes, his movements barely discernible.

The Fremen extended a finger to the sand between them, drew a figure there. It looked like a bowl with an arrow spilling out of it. “There are many Harkonnen patrols,” he said. He lifted his finger, pointed upward across the cliffs that Hawat and his men had descended.

Hawat nodded.

Many patrols. Yes.

But still he did not know what this Fremen wanted and this rankled. Mentat training was supposed to give a man the power to see motives.

This had been the worst night of Hawat’s life. He had been at Tsimpo, a garrison village, buffer outpost for the former capital city, Carthag, when the reports of attack began arriving. At first, he’d thought: It’s a raid. The Harkonnens are testing.

But report followed report—faster and faster.

Two legions landed at Carthag.

Five legions—fifty brigades!—attacking the Duke’s main base at Arrakeen.

A legion at Arsunt.

Two battle groups at Splintered Rock.

Then the reports became more detailed—there were Imperial Sardaukar among the attackers—possibly two legions of them. And it became clear that the invaders knew precisely which weight of arms to send where. Precisely! Superb Intelligence.

Hawat’s shocked fury had mounted until it threatened the smooth functioning of his Mentat capabilities. The size of the attack struck his mind like a physical blow.

Now, hiding beneath a bit of desert rock, he nodded to himself, pulled his torn and slashed tunic around him as though warding off the cold shadows.

The size of the attack.

He had always expected their enemy to hire an occasional lighter from the Guild for probing raids. That was an ordinary enough gambit in this kind of House-to-House warfare. Lighters landed and took off on Arrakis regularly to transport the spice for House Atreides. Hawat had taken precautions against random raids by false spice lighters. For a full attack they’d expected no more than ten brigades.

But there were more than two thousand ships down on Arrakis at the last count—not just lighters, but frigates, scouts, monitors, crushers, troop-carriers, dump-boxes….

More than a hundred brigades—ten legions!

The entire spice income of Arrakis for fifty years might just cover the cost of such a venture.

It might.

I underestimated what the Baron was willing to spend in attacking us, Hawat thought. Ifailedmy Duke.

Then there was the matter of the traitor.

I will live long enough to see her strangled! he thought. I should’ve killed that Bene Gesserit witch when I had the chance. There was no doubt in his mind who had betrayed them—the Lady Jessica. She fitted all the facts available.

“Your man Gurney Halleck and part of his force are safe with our smuggler friends,” the Fremen said.

“Good.”

So Gurney will get off this hell planet. We’re not all gone.

Hawat glanced back at the huddle of his men. He had started the night just past with three hundred of his finest. Of those, an even twenty remained and half of them were wounded. Some of them slept now, standing up, leaning against the rock, sprawled on the sand beneath the rock. Their last ’thopter, the one they’d been using as a ground-effect machine to carry their wounded, had given out just before dawn. They had cut it up with lasguns and hidden the pieces, then worked their way down into this hiding place at the edge of the basin.

Hawat had only a rough idea of their location—some two hundred kilometers southeast of Arrakeen. The main traveled ways between the Shield Wall sietch communities were somewhere south of them.

The Fremen across from Hawat threw back his hood and stillsuit cap to reveal sandy hair and beard. The hair was combed straight back from a high, thin forehead. He had the unreadable total blue eyes of the spice diet. Beard and mustache were stained at one side of the mouth, his hair matted there by pressure of the looping catchtube from his nose plugs.

The man removed his plugs, readjusted them. He rubbed at a scar beside his nose.

“If you cross the sink here this night,” the Fremen said, “you must not use shields. There is a break in the wall….” He turned on his heels, pointed south. “… there, and it is open sand down to the erg. Shields will attract a….” He hesitated. “… worm. They don’t often come in here, but a shield will bring one every time.”

He said worm, Hawat thought. He was going to say something else. What? And what does he want of us?

Hawat sighed.

He could not recall ever before being this tired. It was a muscle weariness that energy pills were unable to ease.

Those damnable Sardaukar!

With a self-accusing bitterness, he faced the thought of the soldier-fanatics and the Imperial treachery they represented. His own Mentat assessment of the data told him how little chance he had ever to present evidence of this treachery before the High Council of the Landsraad where justice might be done.

“Do you wish to go to the smugglers?” the Fremen asked.

“Is it possible?”

“The way is long.”

“Fremen don’t like to say no, ” Idaho had told him once.

Hawat said: “You haven’t yet told me whether your people can help my wounded.”

“They are wounded.”

The same damned answer every time!

“We know they’re wounded!” Hawat snapped. “That’s not the—”

“Peace, friend,” the Fremen cautioned. “What do your wounded say? Are there those among them who can see the water need of your tribe?”

“We haven’t talked about water,” Hawat said. “We—”

“I can understand your reluctance,” the Fremen said. “They are your friends, your tribesmen. Do you have water?”

“Not enough.”

The Fremen gestured to Hawat’s tunic, the skin exposed beneath it. “You were caught in-sietch, without your suits. You must make a water decision, friend.”

“Can we hire your help?”

The Fremen shrugged. “You have no water.” He glanced at the group behind Hawat. “How many of your wounded would you spend?”

Hawat fell silent, staring at the man. He could see as a Mentat that their communication was out of phase. Word-sounds were not being linked up here in the normal manner.

“I am Thufir Hawat,” he said. “I can speak for my Duke. I will make promissory commitment now for your help. I wish a limited form of help, preserving my force long enough only to kill a traitor who thinks herself beyond vengeance.”

You wish our siding in a vendetta?”

“The vendetta I’ll handle myself. I wish to be freed of responsibility for my wounded that I may get about it.”

The Fremen scowled. “How can you be responsible for your wounded? They are their own responsibility. The water’s at issue, Thufir Hawat. Would you have me take that decision away from you?”

The man put a hand to a weapon concealed beneath his robe.

Hawat tensed, wondering: Is there betrayal here?

“What do you fear?” the Fremen demanded.

These people and their disconcerting directness! Hawat spoke cautiously. “There’s a price on my head.”

“Ah-h-h-h.” The Fremen removed his hand from his weapon. “You think we have the Byzantine corruption. You don’t know us. The Harkonnens have not water enough to buy the smallest child among us.”

But they had the price of Guild passage for more than two thousand fighting ships, Hawat thought. And the size of that price still staggered him.

“We both fight Harkonnens,” Hawat said. “Should we not share the problems and ways of meeting the battle issue?”

“We are sharing,” the Fremen said. “I have seen you fight Harkonnens. You are good. There’ve been times I’d have appreciated your arm beside me.”

“Say where my arm may help you,” Hawat said.

“Who knows?” the Fremen asked. “There are Harkonnen forces everywhere. But you still have not made the water decision or put it to your wounded.”

I must be cautious, Hawat told himself. There’s a thing here that’s not understood.

He said: “Will you show me your way, the Arrakeen way?”

“Stranger-thinking,” the Fremen said, and there was a sneer in his tone. He pointed to the northwest across the clifftop. “We watched you come across the sand last night.” He lowered his arm. “You keep your force on the slip-face of the dunes. Bad. You have no stillsuits, no water. You will not last long.”

“The ways of Arrakis don’t come easily,” Hawat said.

“Truth. But we’ve killed Harkonnens.”

“What do you do with your own wounded?” Hawat demanded.

“Does a man not know when he is worth saving?” the Fremen asked. “Your wounded know you have no water.” He tilted his head, looking sideways up at Hawat. “This is clearly a time for water decision. Both wounded and unwounded must look to the tribe’s future.”

The tribe’s future, Hawat thought. The tribe of Atreides. There’s sense in that. He forced himself to the question he had been avoiding.

“Have you word of my Duke or his son?”

Unreadable blue eyes stared upward into Hawat’s. “Word?”

“Their fate!” Hawat snapped.

“Fate is the same for everyone,” the Fremen said. “Your Duke, it is said, has met his fate. As to the Lisan al-Gaib, his son, that is in Liet’s hands. Liet has not said.”

I knew the answer without asking, Hawat thought.

He glanced back at his men. They were all awake now. They had heard. They were staring out across the sand, the realization in their expressions: there was no returning to Caladan for them, and now Arrakis was lost.

Hawat turned back to the Fremen. “Have you heard of Duncan Idaho?”

“He was in the great house when the shield went down,” the Fremen said. “This I’ve heard… no more.”

She dropped the shield and let in the Harkonnens, he thought. I was the one who sat with my back to a door. How could she do this when it meant turning also against her own son? But … who knows how a Bene Gesserit witch thinks… if you can call it thinking?

Hawat tried to swallow in a dry throat. “When will you hear about the boy?”

“We know little of what happens in Arrakeen,” the Fremen said. He shrugged. “Who knows?”

“You have ways of finding out?”

“Perhaps.” The Fremen rubbed at the scar beside his nose. “Tell me, Thufir Hawat, do you have knowledge of the big weapons the Harkonnens used?”

The artillery, Hawat thought bitterly. Who could have guessed they’d use artillery in this day of shields?

“You refer to the artillery they used to trap our people in the caves,” he said. “I’ve … theoretical knowledge of such explosive weapons.”

“Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die,” the Fremen said.

“Why do you ask about these weapons?”

“Liet wishes it.”

Is that what he wants from us? Hawat wondered. He said: “Did you come here seeking information about the big guns?”

“Liet wished to see one of the weapons for himself.”

“Then you should just go take one,” Hawat sneered.

“Yes,” the Fremen said. “We took one. We have it hidden where Stilgar can study it for Liet and where Liet can see it for himself if he wishes. But I doubt he’ll want to: the weapon is not a very good one. Poor design for Arrakis.”

“You … took one?” Hawat asked.

“It was a good fight,” the Fremen said. “We lost only two men and spilled the water from more than a hundred of theirs.”

There were Sardaukar at every gun, Hawat thought. This desert madman speaks casually of losing only two men against Sardaukar!

“We would not have lost the two except for those others fighting beside the Harkonnens,” the Fremen said. “Some of those are good fighters.”

One of Hawat’s men limped forward, looked down at the squatting Fremen. “Are you talking about Sardaukar?”

“He’s talking about Sardaukar,” Hawat said.

“Sardaukar!” the Fremen said, and there appeared to be glee in his voice. “Ah-h-h, so that’s what they are! This was a good night indeed. Sardaukar. Which legion? Do you know?”

“We … don’t know,” Hawat said.

“Sardaukar,” the Fremen mused. “Yet they wear Harkonnen clothing. Is that not strange?”

“The Emperor does not wish it known he fights against a Great House,” Hawat said.

“But you know they are Sardaukar.”

“Who am I?” Hawat asked bitterly.

“You are Thufir Hawat,” the man said matter-of-factly. “Well, we would have learned it in time. We’ve sent three of them captive to be questioned by Liet’s men.”

Hawat’s aide spoke slowly, disbelief in every word: “You … captured Sardaukar?”

“Only three of them,” the Fremen said. “They fought well.”

If only we’d had the time to link up with these Fremen, Hawat thought. It was a sour lament in his mind. If only we could’ve trained them and armed them. Great Mother, what a fighting force we’d have had!

“Perhaps you delay because of worry over the Lisan al-Gaib,” the Fremen said. “If he is truly the Lisan al-Gaib, harm cannot touch him. Do not spend thoughts on a matter which has not been proved.”

“I serve the … Lisan al-Gaib,” Hawat said. “His welfare is my concern. I’ve pledged myself to this.”

“You are pledged to his water?”

Hawat glanced at his aide, who was still staring at the Fremen, returned his attention to the squatting figure. “To his water, yes.”

“You wish to return to Arrakeen, to the place of his water?”

“To … yes, to the place of his water.”

“Why did you not say at first it was a water matter?” The Fremen stood up, seated his nose plugs firmly.

Hawat motioned with his head for his aide to return to the others. With a tired shrug, the man obeyed. Hawat heard a low-voiced conversation arise among the men.

The Fremen said: “There is always a way to water.”

Behind Hawat, a man cursed. Hawat’s aide called: “Thufir! Arkie just died.”

The Fremen put a fist to his ear. “The bond of water! It’s a sign!” He stared at Hawat. “We have a place nearby for accepting the water. Shall I call my men?”

The aide returned to Hawat’s side, said: “Thufir, a couple of the men left wives in Arrakeen. They’re… well, you know how it is at a time like this.”

The Fremen still held his fist to his ear. “Is it the bond of water, Thufir Hawat?” he demanded.

Hawat’s mind was racing. He sensed now the direction of the Fremen’s words, but feared the reaction of the tired men under the rock overhang when they understood it.

“The bond of water,” Hawat said.

“Let our tribes be joined,” the Fremen said, and he lowered his fist.

As though that were the signal, four men slid and dropped down from the rocks above them. They darted back under the overhang, rolled the dead man in a loose robe, lifted him and began running with him along the cliff wall to the right. Spurts of dust lifted around their running feet.

It was over before Hawat’s tired men could gather their wits. The group with the body hanging like a sack in its enfolding robe was gone around a turn in the cliff.

One of Hawat’s men shouted: “Where they going with Arkie? He was—”

“They’re taking him to … bury him,” Hawat said.

“Fremen don’t bury their dead!” the man barked. “Don’t you try any tricks on us, Thufir. We know what they do. Arkie was one of—”

“Paradise were sure for a man who died in the service of Lisan al-Gaib,” the Fremen said. “If it is the Lisan al-Gaib you serve, as you have said it, why raise mourning cries? The memory of one who died in this fashion will live as long as the memory of man endures.”

But Hawat’s men advanced, angry looks on their faces. One had captured a lasgun. He started to draw it.

“Stop right where you are!” Hawat barked. He fought down the sick fatigue that gripped his muscles. “These people respect our dead. Customs differ, but the meaning’s the same.”

“They’re going to render Arkie down for his water,” the man with the lasgun snarled.

“Is it that your men wish to attend the ceremony?” the Fremen asked.

He doesn’t even see the problem, Hawat thought. The naïveté of the Fremen was frightening.

“They’re concerned for a respected comrade,” Hawat said.

“We will treat your comrade with the same reverence we treat our own,” the Fremen said. “This is the bond of water. We know the rites. A man’s flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.”

Hawat spoke quickly as the man with the lasgun advanced another step. “Will you now help our wounded?”

“One does not question the bond,” the Fremen said. “We will do for you what a tribe does for its own. First, we must get all of you suited and see to the necessities.”

The man with the lasgun hesitated.

Hawat’s aide said: “Are we buying help with Arkie’s … water?”

“Not buying,” Hawat said. “We’ve joined these people.”

“Customs differ,” one of his men muttered.

Hawat began to relax.

“And they’ll help us get to Arrakeen?”

“We will kill Harkonnens,” the Fremen said. He grinned. “And Sardaukar.” He stepped backward, cupped his hands beside his ears and tipped his head back, listening. Presently, he lowered his hands, said: “An aircraft comes. Conceal yourselves beneath the rock and remain motionless.”

At a gesture from Hawat, his men obeyed.

The Fremen took Hawat’s arm, pressed him back with the others. “We will fight in the time of fighting,” the man said. He reached beneath his robes, brought out a small cage, lifted a creature from it.

Hawat recognized a tiny bat. The bat turned its head and Hawat saw its blue-within-blue eyes.

The Fremen stroked the bat, soothing it, crooning to it. He bent over the animal’s head, allowed a drop of saliva to fall from his tongue into the bat’s upturned mouth. The bat stretched its wings, but remained on the Fremen’s opened hand. The man took a tiny tube, held it beside the bat’s head and chattered into the tube; then, lifting the creature high, he threw it upward.

The bat swooped away beside the cliff and was lost to sight.

The Fremen folded the cage, thrust it beneath his robe. Again, he bent his head, listening. “They quarter the high country,” he said. “One wonders who they seek up there.”

“It’s known that we retreated in this direction,” Hawat said.

“One should never presume one is the sole object of a hunt,” the Fremen said. “Watch the other side of the basin. You will see a thing.”

Time passed.

Some of Hawat’s men stirred, whispering.

“Remain silent as frightened animals,” the Fremen hissed.

Hawat discerned movement near the opposite cliff—flitting blurs of tan on tan.

“My little friend carried his message,” the Fremen said. “He is a good messenger—day or night. I’ll be unhappy to lose that one.”

The movement across the sink faded away. On the entire four to five kilometer expanse of sand nothing remained but the growing pressure of the day’s heat—blurred columns of rising air.

“Be most silent now,” the Fremen whispered.

A file of plodding figures emerged from a break in the opposite cliff, headed directly across the sink. To Hawat, they appeared to be Fremen, but a curiously inept band. He counted six men making heavy going of it over the dunes.

A “thwok-thwok” of ornithopter wings sounded high to the right behind Hawat’s group. The craft came over the cliff wall above them—an Atreides ‘thopter with Harkonnen battle colors splashed on it. The ’thopter swooped toward the men crossing the sink.

The group there stopped on a dune crest, waved.

The ‘thopter circled once over them in a tight curve, came back for a dust-shrouded landing in front of the Fremen. Five men swarmed from the ’thopter and Hawat saw the dust-repellent shimmering of shields and, in their motions, the hard competence of Sardaukar.

“Aiihh! They use their stupid shields,” the Fremen beside Hawat hissed. He glanced toward the open south wall of the sink.

“They are Sardaukar,” Hawat whispered.

“Good.”

The Sardaukar approached the waiting group of Fremen in an enclosing half-circle. Sun glinted on blades held ready. The Fremen stood in a compact group, apparently indifferent.

Abruptly, the sand around the two groups sprouted Fremen. They were at the ornithopter, then in it. Where the two groups had met at the dune crest, a dust cloud partly obscured violent motion.

Presently, dust settled. Only Fremen remained standing.

“They left only three men in their ’thopter,” the Fremen beside Hawat said. “That was fortunate. I don’t believe we had to damage the craft in taking it.”

Behind Hawat, one of his men whispered: “Those were Sardaukar!”

“Did you notice how well they fought?” the Fremen asked.

Hawat took a deep breath. He smelled the burned dust around him, felt the heat, the dryness. In a voice to match that dryness, he said: “Yes, they fought well, indeed.”

The captured ’thopter took off with a lurching flap of wings, angled upward to the south in a steep, wing-tucked climb.

So these Fremen can handle ’thopters, too, Hawat thought.

On the distant dune, a Fremen waved a square of green cloth: once … twice.

“More come!” the Fremen beside Hawat barked. “Be ready. I’d hoped to have us away without more inconvenience.”

Inconvenience! Hawat thought.

He saw two more ’thopters swooping from high in the west onto an area of sand suddenly devoid of visible Fremen. Only eight splotches of blue—the bodies of the Sardaukar in Harkonnen uniforms—remained at the scene of violence.

Another ’thopter glided in over the cliff wall above Hawat. He drew in a sharp breath as he saw it—a big troop-carrier. It flew with the slow, spread-wing heaviness of a full load—like a giant bird coming to its nest.

In the distance, the purple finger of a lasgun beam flicked from one of the diving ’thopters. It laced across the sand, raising a sharp trail of dust.

“The cowards!” the Fremen beside Hawat rasped.

The troop carrier settled toward the patch of blue-clad bodies. Its wings crept out to full reach, began the cupping action of a quick stop.

Hawat’s attention was caught by a flash of sun on metal to the south, a ‘thopter plummeting there in a power dive, wings folded flat against its sides, its jets a golden flare against the dark silvered gray of the sky. It plunged like an arrow toward the troop carrier which was unshielded because of the lasgun activity around it. Straight into the carrier the diving ’thopter plunged.

A flaming roar shook the basin. Rocks tumbled from the cliff walls all around. A geyser of red-orange shot skyward from the sand where the carrier and its companion ’thopters had been—everything there caught in the flame.

It was the Fremen who took off in that captured ’thopter, Hawat thought. He deliberately sacrificed himself to get that carrier. Great Mother! What are these Fremen?

“A reasonable exchange,” said the Fremen beside Hawat. “There must’ve been three hundred men in that carrier. Now, we must see to their water and make plans to get another aircraft.” He started to step out of their rock-shadowed concealment.

A rain of blue uniforms came over the cliff wall in front of him, falling in low-suspensor slowness. In the flashing instant, Hawat had time to see that they were Sardaukar, hard faces set in battle frenzy, that they were unshielded and each carried a knife in one hand, a stunner in the other.

A thrown knife caught Hawat’s Fremen companion in the throat, hurling him backward, twisting face down. Hawat had only time to draw his own knife before blackness of a stunner projectile felled him.

***

As THE ornithopters glided out of the night above them, Paul grabbed his mother’s arm, snapped: “Don’t move!”

Then he saw the lead craft in the moonlight, the way its wings cupped to brake for landing, the reckless dash of the hands at the controls.

“It’s Idaho,” he breathed.

The craft and its companions settled into the basin like a covey of birds coming to nest. Idaho was out of his ’thopter and running toward them before the dust settled. Two figures in Fremen robes followed him. Paul recognized one: the tall, sandy-bearded Kynes.

“This way!” Kynes called and he veered left.

Behind Kynes, other Fremen were throwing fabric covers over their ornithopters. The craft became a row of shallow dunes.

Idaho skidded to a stop in front of Paul, saluted. “M’Lord, the Fremen have a temporary hiding place nearby where we—”

“What about that back there?”

Paul pointed to the violence above the distant cliff—the jetflares, the purple beams of lasguns lacing the desert.

A rare smile touched Idaho’s round, placid face. “M’Lord … Sire, I’ve left them a little sur—”

Glaring white light filled the desert—bright as a sun, etching their shadows onto the rock floor of the ledge. In one sweeping motion, Idaho had Paul’s arm in one hand, Jessica’s shoulder in the other, hurling them down off the ledge into the basin. They sprawled together in the sand as the roar of an explosion thundered over them. Its shock wave tumbled chips off the rock ledge they had vacated.

Idaho sat up, brushed sand from himself.

“Not the family atomics!” Jessica said. “I thought—”

“You planted a shield back there,” Paul said.

“A big one turned to full force,” Idaho said. “A lasgun beam touched it and….” He shrugged.

“Subatomic fusion,” Jessica said. “That’s a dangerous weapon.”

“Not weapon, m’Lady, defense. That scum will think twice before using lasguns another time.”

The Fremen from the ornithopters stopped above them. One called in a low voice: “We should get under cover, friends.”

Paul got to his feet as Idaho helped Jessica up.

“That blast will attract considerable attention, Sire,” Idaho said.

Sire, Paul thought.

The word had such a strange sound when directed at him. Sire had always been his father.

He felt himself touched briefly by his powers of prescience, seeing himself infected by the wild race consciousness that was moving the human universe toward chaos. The vision left him shaken, and he allowed Idaho to guide him along the edge of the basin to a rock projection. Fremen there were opening a way down into the sand with their compaction tools.

“May I take your pack, Sire?” Idaho asked.

“It’s not heavy, Duncan,” Paul said.

“You have no body shield,” Idaho said. “Do you wish mine?” He glanced at the distant cliff. “Not likely there’ll be any more lasgun activity about.”

“Keep your shield, Duncan. Your right arm is shield enough for me.”

Jessica saw the way the praise took effect, how Idaho moved closer to Paul, and she thought: Such a sure hand my son has with his people.

The Fremen removed a rock plug that opened a passage down into the native basement complex of the desert. A camouflage cover was rigged for the opening.

“This way,” one of the Fremen said, and he led them down rock steps into darkness.

Behind them, the cover blotted out the moonlight. A dim green glow came alive ahead, revealing the steps and rock walls, a turn to the left. Robed Fremen were all around them now, pressing downward. They rounded the corner, found another down-slanting passage. It opened into a rough cave chamber.

Kynes stood before them, jubba hood thrown back. The neck of his still-suit glistening in the green light. His long hair and beard were mussed. The blue eyes without whites were a darkness under heavy brows.

In the moment of encounter, Kynes wondered at himself: Why am I helping these people? It’s the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done. It could doom me with them.

Then he looked squarely at Paul, seeing the boy who had taken on the mantle of manhood, masking grief, suppressing all except the position that now must be assumed—the dukedom. And Kynes realized in that moment the dukedom still existed and solely because of this youth—and this was not a thing to be taken lightly.

Jessica glanced once around the chamber, registering it on her senses in the Bene Gesserit way—a laboratory, a civil place full of angles and squares in the ancient manner.

“This is one of the Imperial Ecological Testing Stations my father wanted as advance bases,” Paul said.

His father wanted! Kynes thought.

And again Kynes wondered at himself. Am I foolish to aid these fugitives? Why am I doing it? It’d be so easy to take them now, to buy the Harkonnen trust with them.

Paul followed his mother’s example, gestalting the room, seeing the workbench down one side, the walls of featureless rock. Instruments lined the bench—dials glowing, wire gridex planes with fluting glass emerging from them. An ozone smell permeated the place.

Some of the Fremen moved on around a concealing angle in the chamber and new sounds started there—machine coughs, the whinnies of spinning belts and multidrives.

Paul looked to the end of the room, saw cages with small animals in them stacked against the wall.

“You’ve recognized this place correctly,” Kynes said. “For what would you use such a place, Paul Atreides?”

“To make this planet a fit place for humans,” Paul said.

Perhaps that’s why I help them, Kynes thought.

The machine sounds abruptly hummed away to silence. Into this void there came a thin animal squeak from the cages. It was cut off abruptly as though in embarrassment.

Paul returned his attention to the cages, saw that the animals were brown-winged bats. An automatic feeder extended from the side wall across the cages.

A Fremen emerged from the hidden area of the chamber, spoke to Kynes: “Liet, the field-generator equipment is not working. I am unable to mask us from proximity detectors.”

“Can you repair it?” Kynes asked.

“Not quickly. The parts….” The man shrugged.

“Yes,” Kynes said. “Then we’ll do without machinery. Get a hand pump for air out to the surface.”

“Immediately.” The man hurried away.

Kynes turned back to Paul. “You gave a good answer.”

Jessica marked the easy rumble of the man’s voice. It was a royal voice, accustomed to command. And she had not missed the reference to him as Liet. Liet was the Fremen alter ego, the other face of the tame planetologist.

“We’re most grateful for your help, Doctor Kynes,” she said.

“Mm-m-m, we’ll see,” Kynes said. He nodded to one of his men. “Spice coffee in my quarters, Shamir.”

“At once, Liet,” the man said.

Kynes indicated an arched opening in the side wall of the chamber. “If you please?”

Jessica allowed herself a regal nod before accepting. She saw Paul give a hand signal to Idaho, telling him to mount guard here.

The passage, two paces deep, opened through a heavy door into a square office lighted by golden glowglobes. Jessica passed her hand across the door as she entered, was startled to identify plasteel.

Paul stepped three paces into the room, dropped his pack to the floor. He heard the door close behind him, studied the place—about eight meters to a side, walls of natural rock, curry-colored, broken by metal filing cabinets on their right. A low desk with milk glass top shot full of yellow bubbles occupied the room’s center. Four suspensor chairs ringed the desk.

Kynes moved around Paul, held a chair for Jessica. She sat down, noting the way her son examined the room.

Paul remained standing for another eyeblink. A faint anomaly in the room’s air currents told him there was a secret exit to their right behind the filing cabinets.

“Will you sit down, Paul Atreides?” Kynes asked.

How carefully he avoids my title, Paul thought. But he accepted the chair, remained silent while Kynes sat down.

“You sense that Arrakis could be a paradise,” Kynes said. “Yet, as you see, the Imperium sends here only its trained hatchetmen, its seekers after the spice!”

Paul held up his thumb with its ducal signet. “Do you see this ring?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know its significance?”

Jessica turned sharply to stare at her son.

“Your father lies dead in the ruins of Arrakeen,” Kynes said. “You are technically the Duke.”

“I’m a soldier of the Imperium,” Paul said, “technically a hatchetman.”

Kynes face darkened. “Even with the Emperor’s Sardaukar standing over your father’s body?”

“The Sardaukar are one thing, the legal source of my authority is another,” Paul said.

“Arrakis has its own way of determining who wears the mantle of authority,” Kynes said.

And Jessica, turning back to look at him, thought: There’s steel in this man that no one has taken the temper out of… and we’ve need of steel. Paul’s doing a dangerous thing.

Paul said: “The Sardaukar on Arrakis are a measure of how much our beloved Emperor feared my father. Now, I will give the Padishah Emperor reasons to fear the—”

“Lad,” Kynes said, “there are things you don’t—”

“You will address me as Sire or My Lord,” Paul said.

Gently, Jessica thought.

Kynes stared at Paul, and Jessica noted the glint of admiration in the planetologist’s face, the touch of humor there.

“Sire,” Kynes said.

“I am an embarrassment to the Emperor,” Paul said. “I am an embarrassment to all who would divide Arrakis as their spoil. As I live, I shall continue to be such an embarrassment that I stick in their throats and choke them to death!”

“Words,” Kynes said.

Paul stared at him. Presently, Paul said: “You have a legend of the Lisan al-Gaib here, the Voice from the Outer World, the one who will lead the Fremen to paradise. Your men have—”

“Superstition!” Kynes said.

“Perhaps,” Paul agreed. “Yet perhaps not. Superstitions sometimes have strange roots and stranger branchings.”

“You have a plan,” Kynes said. “This much is obvious… Sire.”

“Could your Fremen provide me with proof positive that the Sardaukar are here in Harkonnen uniform?”

“Quite likely.”

“The Emperor will put a Harkonnen back in power here,” Paul said. “Perhaps even Beast Rabban. Let him. Once he has involved himself beyond escaping his guilt, let the Emperor face the possibility of a Bill of Particulars laid before the Landsraad. Let him answer there where—”

“Paul!” Jessica said.

“Granted that the Landsraad High Council accepts your case,” Kynes said, “there could be only one outcome: general warfare between the Imperium and the Great Houses.”

“Chaos,” Jessica said.

“But I’d present my case to the Emperor,” Paul said, “and give him an alternative to chaos.”

Jessica spoke in a dry tone: “Blackmail?”

“One of the tools of statecraft, as you’ve said yourself,” Paul said, and Jessica heard the bitterness in his voice. “The Emperor has no sons, only daughters.”

“You’d aim for the throne?” Jessica asked.

“The Emperor will not risk having the Imperium shattered by total war,” Paul said. “Planets blasted, disorder everywhere—he’ll not risk that.”

“This is a desperate gamble you propose,” Kynes said.

“What do the Great Houses of the Landsraad fear most?” Paul asked. “They fear most what is happening here right now on Arrakis—the Sardaukar picking them off one by one. That’s why there is a Landsraad. This is the glue of the Great Convention. Only in union do they match the Imperial forces.”

“But they’re—”

“This is what they fear,” Paul said. “Arrakis would become a rallying cry. Each of them would see himself in my father—cut out of the herd and killed.”

Kynes spoke to Jessica: “Would his plan work?”

“I’m no Mentat,” Jessica said.

“But you are Bene Gesserit.”

She shot a probing stare at him, said: “His plan has good points and bad points… as any plan would at this stage. A plan depends as much upon execution as it does upon concept.”

“ ‘Law is the ultimate science,’ ” Paul quoted. “Thus it reads above the Emperor’s door. I propose to show him law.”

“And I’m not sure I could trust the person who conceived this plan,” Kynes said. “Arrakis has its own plan that we—”

“From the throne,” Paul said, “I could make a paradise of Arrakis with the wave of a hand. This is the coin I offer for your support.”

Kynes stiffened. “My loyalty’s not for sale, Sire.”

Paul stared across the desk at him, meeting the cold glare of those blue-within-blue eyes, studying the bearded face, the commanding appearance. A harsh smile touched Paul’s lips and he said: “Well spoken. I apologize.”

Kynes met Paul’s stare and, presently, said: “No Harkonnen ever admitted error. Perhaps you’re not like them, Atreides.”

“It could be a fault in their education,” Paul said. “You say you’re not for sale, but I believe I’ve the coin you’ll accept. For your loyalty I offer my loyalty to you… totally.”

My son has the Atreides sincerity, Jessica thought. He has that tremendous, almost naïve honor—and what a powerful force that truly is.

She saw that Paul’s words had shaken Kynes.

“This is nonsense,” Kynes said. “You’re just a boy and—”

“I’m the Duke,” Paul said. “I’m an Atreides. No Atreides has ever broken such a bond.”

Kynes swallowed.

“When I say totally,” Paul said, “I mean without reservation. I would give my life for you.”

“Sire!” Kynes said, and the word was torn from him, but Jessica saw that he was not now speaking to a boy of fifteen, but to a man, to a superior. Now Kynes meant the word.

In this moment he’d give his life for Paul, she thought. How do the Atreides accomplish this thing so quickly, so easily?

“I know you mean this,” Kynes said. “Yet the Harkon—”

The door behind Paul slammed open. He whirled to see reeling violence—shouting, the clash of steel, wax-image faces grimacing in the passage.

With his mother beside him, Paul leaped for the door, seeing Idaho blocking the passage, his blood-pitted eyes there visible through a shield blur, claw hands beyond him, arcs of steel chopping futilely at the shield. There was the orange fire-mouth of a stunner repelled by the shield. Idaho’s blades were through it all, flick-flicking, red dripping from them.

Then Kynes was beside Paul and they threw their weight against the door.

Paul had one last glimpse of Idaho standing against a swarm of Harkonnen uniforms—his jerking, controlled staggers, the black goat hair with a red blossom of death in it. Then the door was closed and there came a snick as Kynes threw the bolts.

“I appear to’ve decided,” Kynes said.

“Someone detected your machinery before it was shut down,” Paul said. He pulled his mother away from the door, met the despair in her eyes.

“I should’ve suspected trouble when the coffee failed to arrive,” Kynes said.

“You’ve a bolt hole out of here,” Paul said. “Shall we use it?”

Kynes took a deep breath, said: “This door should hold for at least twenty minutes against all but a lasgun.”

“They’ll not use a lasgun for fear we’ve shields on this side,” Paul said.

“Those were Sardaukar in Harkonnen uniform,” Jessica whispered.

They could hear pounding on the door now, rhythmic blows.

Kynes indicated the cabinets against the right-hand wall, said: “This way.” He crossed to the first cabinet, opened a drawer, manipulated a handle within it. The entire wall of cabinets swung open to expose the black mouth of a tunnel. “This door also is plasteel,” Kynes said.

“You were well prepared,” Jessica said.

“We lived under the Harkonnens for eighty years,” Kynes said. He herded them into the darkness, closed the door.

In the sudden blackness, Jessica saw a luminous arrow on the floor ahead of her.

Kynes’ voice came from behind them: “We’ll separate here. This wall is tougher. It’ll stand for at least an hour. Follow the arrows like that one on the floor. They’ll be extinguished by your passage. They lead through a maze to another exit where I’ve secreted a ‘thopter. There’s a storm across the desert tonight. Your only hope is to run for that storm, dive into the top of it, ride with it. My people have done this in stealing ’thopters. If you stay high in the storm you’ll survive.”

“What of you?” Paul asked.

“I’ll try to escape another way. If I’m captured … well, I’m still Imperial Planetologist. I can say I was your captive.”

Running like cowards, Paul thought. But how else can I live to avenge my father? He turned to face the door.

Jessica heard him move, said “Duncan’s dead, Paul. You saw the wound. You can do nothing for him.”

“I’ll take full payment for them all one day,” Paul said.

“Not unless you hurry now,” Kynes said.

Paul felt the man’s hand on his shoulder.

“Where will we meet, Kynes?” Paul asked.

“I’ll send Fremen searching for you. The storm’s path is known. Hurry now, and the Great Mother give you speed and luck.”

They heard him go, a scrambling in the blackness.

Jessica found Paul’s hand, pulled him gently. “We must not get separated,” she said.

“Yes.”

He followed her across the first arrow, seeing it go black as they touched it. Another arrow beckoned ahead.

They crossed it, saw it extinguish itself, saw another arrow ahead.

They were running now.

Plans within plans within plans within plans, Jessica thought. Have we become part of someone else’s plan now?

The arrows led them around turnings, past side openings only dimly sensed in the faint luminescence. Their way slanted downward for a time, then up, ever up. They came finally to steps, rounded a corner and were brought short by a glowing wall with a dark handle visible in its center.

Paul pressed the handle.

The wall swung away from them. Light flared to reveal a rock-hewn cavern with an ornithopter squatting in its center. A flat gray wall with a doorsign on it loomed beyond the aircraft.

“Where did Kynes go?” Jessica asked.

“He did what any good guerrilla leader would,” Paul said. “He separated us into two parties and arranged that he couldn’t reveal where we are if he’s captured. He won’t really know.”

Paul drew her into the room, noting how their feet kicked up dust on the floor.

“No one’s been here for a long time,” he said.

“He seemed confident the Fremen could find us,” she said.

“I share that confidence.”

Paul released her hand, crossed to the ornithopter’s left door, opened it, and secured his pack in the rear. “This ship’s proximity masked,” he said. “Instrument panel has remote door control, light control. Eighty years under the Harkonnens taught them to be thorough.”

Jessica leaned against the craft’s other side, catching her breath.

“The Harkonnens will have a covering force over this area,” she said. “They’re not stupid.” She considered her direction sense, pointed right. “The storm we saw is that way.”

Paul nodded, fighting an abrupt reluctance to move. He knew its cause, but found no help in the knowledge. Somewhere this night he had passed a decision-nexus into the deep unknown. He knew the time-area surrounding them, but the here-and-now existed as a place of mystery. It was as though he had seen himself from a distance go out of sight down into a valley. Of the countless paths up out of that valley, some might carry a Paul Atreides back into sight, but many would not.

“The longer we wait the better prepared they’ll be,” Jessica said.

“Get in and strap yourself down,” he said.

He joined her in the ornithopter, still wrestling with the thought that this was blind ground, unseen in any prescient vision. And he realized with an abrupt sense of shock that he had been giving more and more reliance to prescient memory and it had weakened him for this particular emergency.

“If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken.” It was a Bene Gesserit axiom. He took it to himself now, promising never again to fall into that trap … if he lived through this.

Paul fastened his safety harness, saw that his mother was secure, checked the aircraft. The wings were at full spread-rest, their delicate metal interleavings extended. He touched the retractor bar, watched the wings shorten for jet-boost take-off the way Gurney Halleck had taught him. The starter switch moved easily. Dials on the instrument panel came alive as the jetpods were armed. Turbines began their low hissing.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He touched the remote control for lights.

Darkness blanketed them.

His hand was a shadow against the luminous dials as he tripped the remote door control. Grating sounded ahead of them. A cascade of sand swished away to silence. A dusty breeze touched Paul’s cheeks. He closed his door, feeling the sudden pressure.

A wide patch of dust-blurred stars framed in angular darkness appeared where the door-wall had been. Starlight defined a shelf beyond, a suggestion of sand ripples.

Paul depressed the glowing action-sequence switch on his panel. The wings snapped back and down, hurling the ’thopter out of its nest. Power surged from the jetpods as the wings locked into lift attitude.

Jessica let her hands ride lightly on the dual controls, feeling the sureness of her son’s movements. She was frightened, yet exhilarated. Now, Paul’s training is our only hope, she thought. His youth and swiftness.

Paul fed more power to the jetpods. The ’thopter banked, sinking them into their seats as a dark wall lifted against the stars ahead. He gave the craft more wing, more power. Another burst of lifting wingbeats and they came out over rocks, silver-frosted angles and outcroppings in the starlight. The dust-reddened second moon showed itself above the horizon to their right, defining the ribbon trail of the storm.

Paul’s hands danced over the controls. Wings snicked in to beetle stubs. G-force pulled at their flesh as the craft came around in a tight bank.

“Jetflares behind us!” Jessica said.

“I saw them.”

He slammed the power arm forward.

Their ’thopter leaped like a frightened animal, surged southwest toward the storm and the great curve of desert. In the near distance, Paul saw scattered shadows telling where the line of rocks ended, the basement complex sinking beneath the dunes. Beyond stretched moonlit fingernail shadows—dunes diminishing one into another.

And above the horizon climbed the flat immensity of the storm like a wall against the stars.

Something jarred the ’thopter.

“Shellburst!” Jessica gasped. “They’re using some kind of projectile weapon.”

She saw a sudden animal grin on Paul’s face. “They seem to be avoiding their lasguns,” he said.

“But we’ve no shields!”

“Do they know that?”

Again the ’thopter shuddered.

Paul twisted to peer back. “Only one of them appears to be fast enough to keep up with us.”

He returned his attention to their course, watching the storm wall grow high in front of them. It loomed like a tangible solid.

“Projectile launchers, rockets, all the ancient weaponry—that’s one thing we’ll give the Fremen,” Paul whispered.

“The storm,” Jessica said. “Hadn’t you better turn?”

“What about the ship behind us?”

“He’s pulling up.”

“Now!”

Paul stubbed the wings, banked hard left into the deceptively slow boiling of the storm wall, felt his cheeks pull in the G-force.

They appeared to glide into a slow clouding of dust that grew heavier and heavier until it blotted out the desert and the moon. The aircraft became a long, horizontal whisper of darkness lighted only by the green luminosity of the instrument panel.

Through Jessica’s mind flashed all the warnings about such storms—that they cut metal like butter, etched flesh to bone and ate away the bones. She felt the buffeting of dust-blanketed wind. It twisted them as Paul fought the controls. She saw him chop the power, felt the ship buck. The metal around them hissed and trembled.

“Sand!” Jessica shouted.

She saw the negative shake of his head in the light from the panel. “Not much sand this high.”

But she could feel them sinking deeper into the maelstrom.

Paul sent the wings to their full soaring length, heard them creak with the strain. He kept his eyes fixed on the instruments, gliding by instinct, fighting for altitude.

The sound of their passage diminished.

The ’thopter began rolling off to the left. Paul focused on the glowing globe within the attitude curve, fought his craft back to level flight.

Jessica had the eerie feeling that they were standing still, that all motion was external. A vague tan flowing against the windows, a rumbling hiss reminded her of the powers around them.

Winds to seven or eight hundred kilometers an hour, she thought. Adrenalin edginess gnawed at her. I must not fear, she told herself, mouthing the words of the Bene Gesserit litany. Fear is the mind-killer.

Slowly her long years of training prevailed.

Calmness returned.

“We have the tiger by the tail,” Paul whispered. “We can’t go down, can’t land… and I don’t think I can lift us out of this. We’ll have to ride it out.”

Calmness drained out of her. Jessica felt her teeth chattering, clamped them together. Then she heard Paul’s voice, low and controlled, reciting the litany:

“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

***

“THEY ARE dead, Baron,” said Iakin Nefud, the guard captain. “Both the woman and the boy are certainly dead.”

The Baron Vladimir Harkonnen sat up in the sleep suspensors of his private quarters. Beyond these quarters and enclosing him like a multishelled egg stretched the space frigate he had grounded on Arrakis. Here in his quarters, though, the ship’s harsh metal was disguised with draperies, with fabric paddings and rare art objects.

“It is a certainty,” the guard captain said. “They are dead.”

The Baron shifted his gross body in the suspensors, focused his attention on an ebaline statue of a leaping boy in a niche across the room. Sleep faded from him. He straightened the padded suspensor beneath the fat folds of his neck, stared across the single glowglobe of his bedchamber to the doorway where Captain Nefud stood blocked by the pentashield.

“They’re certainly dead, Baron,” the man repeated.

The Baron noted the trace of semuta dullness in Nefud’s eyes. It was obvious the man had been deep within the drug’s rapture when he received this report, and had stopped only to take the antidote before rushing here.

“I have a full report,” Nefud said.

Let him sweat a little, the Baron thought. One must always keep the tools of statecraft sharp and ready. Power and fear—sharp and ready.

“Have you seen their bodies?” the Baron rumbled.

Nefud hesitated.

“Well?”

“M‘Lord … they were seen to dive into a sandstorm… winds over eight hundred kilometers. Nothing survives such a storm, m’Lord. Nothing! One of our own craft was destroyed in the pursuit.”

The Baron stared at Nefud, noting the nervous twitch in the scissors line of the man’s jaw muscles, the way the chin moved as Nefud swallowed.

“You have seen the bodies?” the Baron asked.

“M’Lord—”

“For what purpose do you come here rattling your armor?” the Baron roared. “To tell me a thing is certain when it is not? Do you think I’ll praise you for such stupidity, give you another promotion?”

Nefud’s face went bone pale.

Look at the chicken, the Baron thought. I am surrounded by such useless clods. If I scattered sand before this creature and told him it was grain, he’d peck at it:

“The man Idaho led us to them, then?” the Baron asked.

“Yes, m’Lord!”

Look how he blurts out his answer, the Baron thought. He said: “They were attempting to flee to the Fremen, eh?”

“Yes, m’Lord.”

“Is there more to this… report?”

“The Imperial Planetologist, Kynes, is involved, m’Lord. Idaho joined this Kynes under mysterious circumstances… I might even say suspicious circumstances.”

“So?”

“They … ah, fled together to a place in the desert where it’s apparent the boy and his mother were hiding. In the excitement of the chase, several of our groups were caught in a lasgun-shield explosion.”

“How many did we lose?”

“I’m … ah, not sure yet, m’Lord.”

He’s lying, the Baron thought. It must’ve been pretty bad.

“The Imperial lackey, this Kynes,” the Baron said. “He was playing a double game, eh?”

“I’d stake my reputation on it, m’Lord.”

His reputation!

“Have the man killed,” the Baron said.

“M’Lord! Kynes is the Imperial Planetologist, His Majesty’s own serv—”

“Make it look like an accident, then!”

“M’Lord, there were Sardaukar with our forces in the subjugation of this Fremen nest. They have Kynes in custody now.”

“Get him away from them. Say I wish to question him.”

“If they demur?”

“They will not if you handle it correctly.”

Nefud swallowed. “Yes, m’Lord.”

“The man must die,” the Baron rumbled. “He tried to help my enemies.”

Nefud shifted from one foot to the other.

“Well?”

“M’Lord, the Sardaukar have… two persons in custody who might be of interest to you. They’ve caught the Duke’s Master of Assassins.”

“Hawat? Thufir Hawat?”

“I’ve seen the captive myself, m‘Lord. ’Tis Hawat.”

“I’d not’ve believed it possible!”

“They say he was knocked out by a stunner, m’Lord. In the desert where he couldn’t use his shield. He’s virtually unharmed. If we can get our hands on him, he’ll provide great sport.”

“This is a Mentat you speak of,” the Baron growled. “One doesn’t waste a Mentat. Has he spoken? What does he say of his defeat? Could he know the extent of … but no.”

“He has spoken only enough, m’Lord, to reveal his belief that the Lady Jessica was his betrayer.”

“Ah-h-h-h-h.”

The Baron sank back, thinking; then: “You’re sure? It’s the Lady Jessica who attracts his anger?”

“He said it in my presence, m’Lord.”

“Let him think she’s alive, then.”

“But, m’Lord—”

“Be quiet. I wish Hawat treated kindly. He must be told nothing of the late Doctor Yueh, his true betrayer. Let it be said that Doctor Yueh died defending his Duke. In a way, this may even be true. We will, instead, feed his suspicions against the Lady Jessica.”

“M‘Lord, I don’t—”

“The way to control and direct a Mentat, Nefud, is through his information. False information—false results.”

“Yes, m’Lord, but …”

“Is Hawat hungry? Thirsty?”

“M’Lord, Hawat’s still in the hands of the Sardaukar!”

“Yes. Indeed, yes. But the Sardaukar will be as anxious to get information from Hawat as I am. I’ve noticed a thing about our allies, Nefud. They’re not very devious… politically. I do believe this is a deliberate thing; the Emperor wants it that way. Yes. I do believe it. You will remind the Sardaukar commander of my renown at obtaining information from reluctant subjects.”

Nefud looked unhappy. “Yes, m’Lord.”

“You will tell the Sardaukar commander that I wish to question both Hawat and this Kynes at the same time, playing one off against the other. He can understand that much, I think.”

“Yes, m’Lord.”

“And once we have them in our hands….” The Baron nodded.

“M’Lord, the Sardaukar will want an observer with you during any … questioning.”

“I’m sure we can produce an emergency to draw off any unwanted observers, Nefud.”

“I understand, m’Lord. That’s when Kynes can have his accident.”

“Both Kynes and Hawat will have accidents then, Nefud. But only Kynes will have a real accident. It’s Hawat I want. Yes. Ah, yes.”

Nefud blinked, swallowed. He appeared about to ask a question, but remained silent.

“Hawat will be given both food and drink,” the Baron said. “Treated with kindness, with sympathy. In his water you will administer the residual poison developed by the late Piter de Vries. And you will see that the antidote becomes a regular part of Hawat’s diet from this point on … unless I say otherwise.”

“The antidote, yes.” Nefud shook his head. “But—”

“Don’t be dense, Nefud. The Duke almost killed me with that poison-capsule tooth. The gas he exhaled into my presence deprived me of my most valuable Mentat, Piter. I need a replacement.”

“Hawat?”

“Hawat.”

“But—”

“You’re going to say Hawat’s completely loyal to the Atreides. True, but the Atreides are dead. We will woo him. He must be convinced he’s not to blame for the Duke’s demise. It was all the doing of that Bene Gesserit witch. He had an inferior master, one whose reason was clouded by emotion. Mentats admire the ability to calculate without emotion, Nefud. We will woo the formidable Thufir Hawat.”

“Woo him. Yes, m’Lord.”

“Hawat, unfortunately, had a master whose resources were poor, one who could not elevate a Mentat to the sublime peaks of reasoning that are a Mentat’s right. Hawat will see a certain element of truth in this. The Duke couldn’t afford the most efficient spies to provide his Mentat with the required information.” The Baron stared at Nefud. “Let us never deceive ourselves, Nefud. The truth is a powerful weapon. We know how we overwhelmed the Atreides. Hawat knows, too. We did it with wealth.”

“With wealth. Yes, m’Lord.”

“We will woo Hawat,” the Baron said. “We will hide him from the Sardaukar. And we will hold in reserve… the withdrawal of the antidote for the poison. There’s no way of removing the residual poison. And, Nefud, Hawat need never suspect. The antidote will not betray itself to a poison snooper. Hawat can scan his food as he pleases and detect no trace of poison.”

Nefud’s eyes opened wide with understanding.

“The absence of a thing,” the Baron said, “this can be as deadly as the presence. The absence of air, eh? The absence of water? The absence of anything else we’re addicted to.” The Baron nodded. “You understand me, Nefud?”

Nefud swallowed. “Yes, m’Lord.”

“Then get busy. Find the Sardaukar commander and set things in motion.”

“At once, m’Lord.” Nefud bowed, turned, and hurried away.

Hawat by my side! the Baron thought. The Sardaukar will give him to me. If they suspect anything at all it’s that I wish to destroy the Mentat. And this suspicion I’ll confirm! The fools! One of the most formidable Mentats in all history, a Mentat trained to kill, and they’ll toss him to me like some silly toy to be broken. I will show them what use can be made of such a toy.

The Baron reached beneath a drapery beside his suspensor bed, pressed a button to summon his older nephew, Rabban. He sat back, smiling.

And all the Atreides dead!

The stupid guard captain had been right, of course. Certainly, nothing survived in the path of a sandblast storm on Arrakis. Not an ornithopter… or its occupants. The woman and the boy were dead. The bribes in the right places, the unthinkable expenditure to bring overwhelming military force down onto one planet… all the sly reports tailored for the Emperor’s ears alone, all the careful scheming were here at last coming to full fruition.

Power andfear—fearand power!

The Baron could see the path ahead of him. One day, a Harkonnen would be Emperor. Not himself, and no spawn of his loins. But a Harkonnen. Not this Rabban he’d summoned, of course. But Rabban’s younger brother, young Feyd-Rautha. There was a sharpness to the boy that the Baron enjoyed… a ferocity.

A lovely boy, the Baron thought. A year or two more—say, by the time he’s seventeen, I’ll know for certain whether he’s the tool that House Harkonnen requires to gain the throne.

“M’Lord Baron.”

The man who stood outside the doorfield of the Baron’s bedchamber was low built, gross of face and body, with the Harkonnen paternal line’s narrow-set eyes and bulge of shoulders. There was yet some rigidity in his fat, but it was obvious to the eye that he’d come one day to the portable suspensors for carrying his excess weight.

A muscle-minded tank-brain, the Baron thought. No Mentat, my nephew… not a Piter de Vries, but perhaps something more precisely devised for the task at hand. If I give him freedom to do it, he’ll grind over everything in his path. Oh, how he’ll be hated here on Arrakis!

“My dear Rabban,” the Baron said. He released the doorfield, but pointedly kept his body shield at full strength, knowing that the shimmer of it would be visible above the bedside glowglobe.

“You summoned me,” Rabban said. He stepped into the room, flicked a glance past the air disturbance of the body shield, searched for a suspensor chair, found none.

“Stand closer where I can see you easily,” the Baron said.

Rabban advanced another step, thinking that the damnable old man had deliberately removed all chairs, forcing a visitor to stand.

“The Atreides are dead,” the Baron said. “The last of them. That’s why I summoned you here to Arrakis. This planet is again yours.”

Rabban blinked. “But I thought you were going to advance Piter de Vries to the—”

“Piter, too, is dead.”

“Piter?”

“Piter.”

The Baron reactivated the doorfield, blanked it against all energy penetration.

“You finally tired of him, eh?” Rabban asked.

His voice fell flat and lifeless in the energy-blanketed room.

“I will say a thing to you just this once,” the Baron rumbled. “You insinuate that I obliterated Piter as one obliterates a trifle.” He snapped fat fingers. “Just like that, eh? I am not so stupid, Nephew. I will take it unkindly if ever again you suggest by word or action that I am so stupid.”

Fear showed in the squinting of Rabban’s eyes. He knew within certain limits how far the old Baron would go against family. Seldom to the point of death unless there were outrageous profit or provocation in it. But family punishments could be painful.

“Forgive me, m’Lord Baron,” Rabban said. He lowered his eyes as much to hide his own anger as to show subservience.

“You do not fool me, Rabban,” the Baron said.

Rabban kept his eyes lowered, swallowed.

“I make a point,” the Baron said. “Never obliterate a man unthinkingly, the way an entire fief might do it through some due process of law. Always do it for an overriding purpose—and know your purpose!”

Anger spoke in Rabban: “But you obliterated the traitor, Yueh! I saw his body being carried out as I arrived last night.”

Rabban stared at his uncle, suddenly frightened by the sound of those words.

But the Baron smiled. “I’m very careful about dangerous weapons,” he said. “Doctor Yueh was a traitor. He gave me the Duke.” Strength poured into the Baron’s voice. “I suborned a doctor of the Suk School! The Inner School! You hear, boy? But that’s a wild sort of weapon to leave lying about. I didn’t obliterate him casually.”

“Does the Emperor know you suborned a Suk doctor?”

This was a penetrating question, the Baron thought. Have I misjudged this nephew?

“The Emperor doesn’t know it yet,” the Baron said. “But his Sardaukar are sure to report it to him. Before that happens, though, I’ll have my own report in his hands through CHOAM Company channels. I will explain that I luckily discovered a doctor who pretended to the conditioning. A false doctor, you understand? Since everyone knows you cannot counter the conditioning of a Suk School, this will be accepted.”

“Ah-h-h, I see,” Rabban murmured.

And the Baron thought: Indeed, I hope you do see. I hope you do see how vital it is that this remain secret. The Baron suddenly wondered at himself. Why did I do that? Why did I boast to this fool nephew of mine—the nephew I must use and discard? The Baron felt anger at himself. He felt betrayed.

“It must be kept secret,” Rabban said. “I understand.”

The Baron sighed. “I give you different instructions about Arrakis this time, Nephew. When last you ruled this place, I held you in strong rein. This time, I have only one requirement.”

“M’Lord?”

“Income.”

“Income?”

“Have you any idea, Rabban, how much we spent to bring such military force to bear on the Atreides? Do you have even the first inkling of how much the Guild charges for military transport?”

“Expensive, eh?”

“Expensive!”

The Baron shot a fat arm toward Rabban. “If you squeeze Arrakis for every cent it can give us for sixty years, you’ll just barely repay us!”

Rabban opened his mouth, closed it without speaking.

“Expensive,” the Baron sneered. “The damnable Guild monopoly on space would’ve ruined us if I hadn’t planned for this expense long ago. You should know, Rabban, that we bore the entire brunt of it. We even paid for transport of the Sardaukar.”

And not for the first time, the Baron wondered if there ever would come a day when the Guild might be circumvented. They were insidious—bleeding off just enough to keep the host from objecting until they had you in their fist where they could force you to pay and pay and pay.

Always, the exorbitant demands rode upon military ventures. “Hazard rates,” the oily Guild agents explained. And for every agent you managed to insert as a watchdog in the Guild Bank structure, they put two agents into your system.

Insufferable!

“Income then,” Rabban said.

The Baron lowered his arm, made a fist. “You must squeeze.”

“And I may do anything I wish as long as I squeeze?”

“Anything.”

“The cannons you brought,” Rabban said. “Could I—”

“I’m removing them,” the Baron said.

“But you—”

“You won’t need such toys. They were a special innovation and are now useless. We need the metal. They cannot go against a shield, Rabban. They were merely the unexpected. It was predictable that the Duke’s men would retreat into cliff caves on this abominable planet. Our cannon merely sealed them in.”

“The Fremen don’t use shields.”

“You may keep some lasguns if you wish.”

“Yes, m’Lord. And I have a free hand.”

“As long as you squeeze.”

Rabban’s smile was gloating. “I understand perfectly, m’Lord.”

“You understand nothing perfectly,” the Baron growled. “Let us have that clear at the outset. What you do understand is how to carry out my orders. Has it occurred to you, nephew, that there are at least five million persons on this planet?”

“Does m‘Lord forget that I was his regent-siridar here before? And if m’Lord will forgive me, his estimate may be low. It’s difficult to count a population scattered among sinks and pans the way they are here. And when you consider the Fremen of—”

“The Fremen aren’t worth considering!”

“Forgive me, m’Lord, but the Sardaukar believe otherwise.”

The Baron hesitated, staring at his nephew. “You know something?”

“M’Lord had retired when I arrived last night. I …ah, took the liberty of contacting some of my lieutenants from… ah, before. They’ve been acting as guides to the Sardaukar. They report that a Fremen band ambushed a Sardaukar force somewhere southeast of here and wiped it out.”

“Wiped out a Sardaukar force?”

“Yes, m’Lord.”

“Impossible!”

Rabban shrugged.

“Fremen defeating Sardaukar,” the Baron sneered.

“I repeat only what was reported to me,” Rabban said. “It is said this Fremen force already had captured the Duke’s redoubtable Thufir Hawat.”

“Ah-h-h-h-h-h.”

The Baron nodded, smiling.

“I believe the report,” Rabban said. “You’ve no idea what a problem the Fremen were.”

“Perhaps, but these weren’t Fremen your lieutenants saw. They must’ve been Atreides men trained by Hawat and disguised as Fremen. It’s the only possible answer.”

Again, Rabban shrugged. “Well, the Sardaukar think they were Fremen. The Sardaukar already have launched a program to wipe out all Fremen.”

“Good!”

“But—”

“It’ll keep the Sardaukar occupied. And we’ll soon have Hawat. I know it! I can feel it! Ah, this has been a day! The Sardaukar off hunting a few useless desert bands while we get the real prize!”

“M’Lord….” Rabban hesitated, frowning. “I’ve always felt that we underestimated the Fremen, both in numbers and in—”

“Ignore them, boy! They’re rabble. It’s the populous towns, cities, and villages that concern us. A great many people there, eh?”

“A great many, m’Lord.”

“They worry me, Rabban.”

“Worry you?”

“Oh … ninety per cent of them are of no concern. But there are always a few… Houses Minor and so on, people of ambition who might try a dangerous thing. If one of them should get off Arrakis with an unpleasant story about what happened here, I’d be most displeased. Have you any idea how displeased I’d be?”

Rabban swallowed.

“You must take immediate measures to hold a hostage from each House Minor,” the Baron said. “As far as anyone off Arrakis must learn, this was straightforward House-to-House battle. The Sardaukar had no part in it, you understand? The Duke was offered the usual quarter and exile, but he died in an unfortunate accident before he could accept. He was about to accept, though. That is the story. And any rumor that there were Sardaukar here, it must be laughed at.”

“As the Emperor wishes it,” Rabban said.

“As the Emperor wishes it.”

“What about the smugglers?”

“No one believes smugglers, Rabban. They are tolerated, but not believed. At any rate, you’ll be spreading some bribes in that quarter… and taking other measures which I’m sure you can think of.”

“Yes, m’Lord.”

“Two things from Arrakis, then, Rabban: income and a merciless fist. You must show no mercy here. Think of these clods as what they are—slaves envious of their masters and waiting only the opportunity to rebel. Not the slightest vestige of pity or mercy must you show them.”

“Can one exterminate an entire planet?” Rabban asked.

“Exterminate?” Surprise showed in the swift turning of the Baron’s head. “Who said anything about exterminating?”

“Well, I presumed you were going to bring in new stock and—”

“I said squeeze, Nephew, not exterminate. Don’t waste the population, merely drive them into utter submission. You must be the carnivore, my boy.” He smiled, a baby’s expression in the dimple-fat face. “A carnivore never stops. Show no mercy. Never stop. Mercy is a chimera. It can be defeated by the stomach rumbling its hunger, by the throat crying its thirst. You must be always hungry and thirsty.” The Baron caressed his bulges beneath the suspensors. “Like me.”

“I see, m’Lord.”

Rabban swung his gaze left and right.

“It’s all clear then, Nephew?”

“Except for one thing, Uncle: the planetologist, Kynes.”

“Ah, yes, Kynes.”

“He’s the Emperor’s man, m’Lord. He can come and go as he pleases. And he’s very close to the Fremen … married one.”

“Kynes will be dead by tomorrow’s nightfall.”

“That’s dangerous work, Uncle, killing an Imperial servant.”

“How do you think I’ve come this far this quickly?” the Baron demanded. His voice was low, charged with unspeakable adjectives. “Besides, you need never have feared Kynes would leave Arrakis. You’re forgetting that he’s addicted to the spice.”

“Of course!”

“Those who know will do nothing to endanger their supply,” the Baron said. “Kynes certainly must know.”

“I forgot,” Rabban said.

They stared at each other in silence.

Presently, the Baron said: “Incidentally, you will make my own supply one of your first concerns. I’ve quite a stockpile of private stuff, but that suicide raid by the Duke’s men got most of what we’d stored for sale.”

Rabban nodded. “Yes, m’Lord.”

The Baron brightened. “Now, tomorrow morning, you will assemble what remains of organization here and you’ll say to them: ‘Our Sublime Padishah Emperor has charged me to take possession of this planet and end all dispute.’ ”

“I understand, m’Lord.”

“This time, I’m sure you do. We will discuss it in more detail tomorrow. Now, leave me to finish my sleep.”

The Baron deactivated his doorfield, watched his nephew out of sight.

A tank-brain, the Baron thought. Muscle-minded tank-brain. They will be bloody pulp here when he’s through with them. Then, when I send in Feyd-Rautha to take the load off them, they’ll cheer their rescuer. Beloved Feyd-Rautha. Benign Feyd-Rautha, the compassionate one who saves them from a beast. Feyd-Rautha, a man to follow and die for. The boy will know by that time how to oppress with impunity. I’m sure he’s the one we need. He’ll learn. And such a lovely body. Really a lovely boy.

***

As PAUL fought the ‘thopter’s controls, he grew aware that he was sorting out the interwoven storm forces, his more than Mentat awareness computing on the basis of fractional minutiae. He felt dust fronts, billowings, mixings of turbulence, an occasional vortex.

The cabin interior was an angry box lighted by the green radiance of instrument dials. The tan flow of dust outside appeared featureless, but his inner sense began to see through the curtain.

I must find the right vortex, he thought.

For a long time now he had sensed the storm’s power diminishing, but still it shook them. He waited out another turbulence.

The vortex began as an abrupt billowing that rattled the entire ship. Paul defied all fear to bank the ’thopter left.

Jessica saw the maneuver on the attitude globe.

“Paul!” she screamed.

The vortex turned them, twisting, tipping. It lifted the ’thopter like a chip on a geyser, spewed them up and out—a winged speck within a core of winding dust lighted by the second moon.

Paul looked down, saw the dust-defined pillar of hot wind that had disgorged them, saw the dying storm trailing away like a dry river into the desert-moon-gray motion growing smaller and smaller below as they rode the updraft.

“We’re out of it,” Jessica whispered.

Paul turned their craft away from the dust in swooping rhythm while he scanned the night sky.

“We’ve given them the slip,” he said.

Jessica felt her heart pounding. She forced herself to calmness, looked at the diminishing storm. Her time sense said they had ridden within that compounding of elemental forces almost four hours, but part of her mind computed the passage as a lifetime. She felt reborn.

It was like the litany, she thought. We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It’s gone, but we remain.

“I don’t like the sound of our wing motion,” Paul said. “We suffered some damage in there.”

He felt the grating, injured flight through his hands on the controls. They were out of the storm, but still not out into the full view of his prescient vision. Yet, they had escaped, and Paul sensed himself trembling on the verge of a revelation.

He shivered.

The sensation was magnetic and terrifying, and he found himself caught on the question of what caused this trembling awareness. Part of it, he felt, was the spice-saturated diet of Arrakis. But he thought part of it could be the litany, as though the words had a power of their own.

“Ishallnotfear…

Cause and effect: he was alive despite malignant forces, and he felt himself poised on a brink of self-awareness that could not have been without the litany’s magic.

Words from the Orange Catholic Bible rang through his memory: “What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?”

“There’s rock all around,” Jessica said.

Paul focused on the ’thopter’s launching, shook his head to clear it. He looked where his mother pointed, saw uplifting rock shapes black on the sand ahead and to the right. He felt wind around his ankles, a stirring of dust in the cabin. There was a hole somewhere, more of the storm’s doing.

“Better set us down on sand,” Jessica said. “The wings might not take full brake.”

He nodded toward a place ahead where sandblasted ridges lifted into moonlight above the dunes. “I’ll set us down near those rocks. Check your safety harness.”

She obeyed, thinking: We’ve water and stillsuits. If we can find food, we can survive a long time on this desert. Fremen live here. What they can do we can do.

“Run for those rocks the instant we’re stopped,” Paul said. “I’ll take the pack.”

“Run for….” She fell silent, nodded. “Worms.”

“Our friends, the worms,” he corrected her. “They’ll get this ’thopter. There’ll be no evidence of where we landed.”

How direct his thinking, she thought.

They glided lower… lower …

There came a rushing sense of motion to their passage—blurred shadows of dunes, rocks lifting like islands. The ’thopter touched a dune top with a soft lurch, skipped a sand valley, touched another dune.

He’s killing our speed against the sand, Jessica thought, and permitted herself to admire his competence.

“Brace yourself!” Paul warned.

He pulled back on the wing brakes, gently at first, then harder and harder. He felt them cup the air, their aspect ratio dropping faster and faster. Wind screamed through the lapped coverts and primaries of the wings’ leaves.

Abruptly, with only the faintest lurch of warning, the left wing, weakened by the storm, twisted upward and in, slamming across the side of the ’thopter. The craft skidded across a dune top, twisting to the left. It tumbled down the opposite face to bury its nose in the next dune amid a cascade of sand. They lay stopped on the broken wing side, the right wing pointing toward the stars.

Paul jerked off his safety harness, hurled himself upward across his mother, wrenching the door open. Sand poured around them into the cabin, bringing a dry smell of burned flint. He grabbed the pack from the rear, saw that his mother was free of her harness. She stepped up onto the side of the right-hand seat and out onto the ’thopter’s metal skin. Paul followed, dragging the pack by its straps.

“Run!” he ordered.

He pointed up the dune face and beyond it where they could see a rock tower undercut by sandblast winds.

Jessica leaped off the ’thopter and ran, scrambling and sliding up the dune. She heard Paul’s panting progress behind. They came out onto a sand ridge that curved away toward the rocks.

“Follow the ridge,” Paul ordered. “It’ll be faster.”

They slogged toward the rocks, sand gripping their feet.

A new sound began to impress itself on them: a muted whisper, a hissing, an abrasive slithering.

“Worm,” Paul said.

It grew louder.

“Faster!” Paul gasped.

The first rock shingle, like a beach slanting from the sand, lay no more than ten meters ahead when they heard metal crunch and shatter behind them.

Paul shifted his pack to his right arm, holding it by the straps. It slapped his side as he ran. He took his mother’s arm with his other hand. They scrambled onto the lifting rock, up a pebble-littered surface through a twisted, wind-carved channel. Breath came dry and gasping in their throats.

“I can’t run any farther,” Jessica panted.

Paul stopped, pressed her into a gut of rock, turned and looked down onto the desert. A mound-in-motion ran parallel to their rock island—moonlit ripples, sand waves, a cresting burrow almost level with Paul’s eyes at a distance of about a kilometer. The flattened dunes of its track curved once—a short loop crossing the patch of desert where they had abandoned their wrecked ornithopter.

Where the worm had been there was no sign of the aircraft.

The burrow mound moved outward into the desert, coursed back across its own path, questing.

“It’s bigger than a Guild spaceship,” Paul whispered. “I was told worms grew large in the deep desert, but I didn’t realize … how big.”

“Nor I,” Jessica breathed.

Again, the thing turned out away from the rocks, sped now with a curbing track toward the horizon. They listened until the sound of its passage was lost in gentle sand stirrings around them.

Paul took a deep breath, looked up at the moon-frosted escarpment, and quoted from the Kitab al-Ibar: “Travel by night and rest in black shade through the day.” He looked at his mother. “We still have a few hours of night. Can you go on?”

“In a moment.”

Paul stepped out onto the rock shingle, shouldered the pack and adjusted its straps. He stood a moment with a paracompass in his hands.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he said.

She pushed herself away from the rock, feeling her strength return. “Which direction?”

“Where this ridge leads.” He pointed.

“Deep into the desert,” she said.

“The Fremen desert,” Paul whispered.

And he paused, shaken by the remembered high relief imagery of a prescient vision he had experienced on Caladan. He had seen this desert. But the set of the vision had been subtly different, like an optical image that had disappeared into his consciousness, been absorbed by memory, and now failed of perfect registry when projected onto the real scene. The vision appeared to have shifted and approached him from a different angle while he remained motionless.

Idaho was with us in the vision, he remembered. But now Idaho is dead.

“Do you see a way to go?” Jessica asked, mistaking his hesitation.

“No,” he said, “But we’ll go anyway.”

He settled his shoulders more firmly in the pack, struck out up a sand-carved channel in the rock. The channel opened onto a moonlit floor of rock with benched ledges climbing away to the south.

Paul headed for the first ledge, clambered onto it. Jessica followed.

She noted presently how their passage became a matter of the immediate and particular—the sand pockets between rocks where their steps were slowed, the wind-carved ridge that cut their hands, the obstruction that forced a choice: Go over or go around? The terrain enforced its own rhythms. They spoke only when necessary and then with the hoarse voices of their exertion.

“Careful here—this ledge is slippery with sand.”

“Watch you don’t hit your head against this overhang.”

“Stay below this ridge; the moon’s at our backs and it’d show our movement to anyone out there.”

Paul stopped in a bight of rock, leaned the pack against a narrow ledge.

Jessica leaned beside him, thankful for the moment of rest. She heard Paul pulling at his stillsuit tube, sipped her own reclaimed water. It tasted brackish, and she remembered the waters of Caladan—a tall fountain enclosing a curve of sky, such a richness of moisture that it hadn’t been noticed for itself … only for its shape, or its reflection, or its sound as she stopped beside it.

To stop, she thought. To rest… truly rest.

It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if only for a moment. There was no mercy where there could be no stopping.

Paul pushed away from the rock ledge, turned, and climbed over a sloping surface. Jessica followed with a sigh.

They slid down onto a wide shelf that led around a sheer rock face. Again, they fell into the disjointed rhythm of movement across this broken land.

Jessica felt that the night was dominated by degrees of smallness in substances beneath their feet and hands—boulders or pea gravel or flaked rock or pea sand or sand itself or grit or dust or gossamer powder.

The powder clogged nose filters and had to be blown out. Pea sand and pea gravel rolled on a hard surface and could spill the unwary. Rock flakes cut.

And the omnipresent sand patches dragged against their feet.

Paul stopped abruptly on a rock shelf, steadied his mother as she stumbled into him.

He was pointing left and she looked along his arm to see that they stood atop a cliff with the desert stretched out like a static ocean some two hundred meters below. It lay there full of moon-silvered waves—shadows of angles that lapsed into curves and, in the distance, lifted to the misted gray blur of another escarpment.

“Open desert,” she said.

“A wide place to cross,” Paul said, and his voice was muffled by the filter trap across his face.

Jessica glanced left and right—nothing but sand below.

Paul stared straight ahead across the open dunes, watching the movement of shadows in the moon’s passage. “About three or four kilometers across,” he said.

“Worms,” she said.

“Sure to be.”

She focused on her weariness, the muscle ache that dulled her senses. “Shall we rest and eat?”

Paul slipped out of the pack, sat down and leaned against it. Jessica supported herself by a hand on his shoulder as she sank to the rock beside him. She felt Paul turn as she settled herself, heard him scrabbling in the pack.

“Here,” he said.

His hand felt dry against hers as he pressed two energy capsules into her palm.

She swallowed them with a grudging spit of water from her stillsuit tube.

“Drink all your water,” Paul said. “Axiom: the best place to conserve your water is in your body. It keeps your energy up. You’re stronger. Trust your stillsuit.”

She obeyed, drained her catchpockets, feeling energy return. She thought then how peaceful it was here in this moment of their tiredness, and she recalled once hearing the minstrel-warrior Gurney Halleck say, “Better a dry morsel and quietness therewith than a house full of sacrifice and strife.”

Jessica repeated the words to Paul.

“That was Gurney,” he said.

She caught the tone of his voice, the way he spoke as of someone dead, thought: And well poor Gurney might be dead. The Atreides forces were either dead or captive or lost like themselves in this waterless void.

“Gurney always had the right quotation,” Paul said. “I can hear him now: ‘And I will make the rivers dry, and sell the land into the hand of the wicked: and I will make the land waste, and all that is therein, by the hand of strangers.’ ”

Jessica closed her eyes, found herself moved close to tears by the pathos in her son’s voice.

Presently, Paul said: “How do you … feel?”

She recognized that his question was directed at her pregnancy, said: “Your sister won’t be born for many months yet. I still feel … physically adequate.”

And she thought: How stiffly formal I speak to my own son! Then, because it was the Bene Gesserit way to seek within for the answer to such an oddity, she searched and found the source of her formality: I’m afraid of my son; Ifearhis strangeness; I fear what he may see ahead of us, what he may tell me.

Paul pulled his hood down over his eyes, listened to the bug-hustling sounds of the night. His lungs were charged with his own silence. His nose itched. He rubbed it, removed the filter and grew conscious of the rich smell of cinnamon.

“There’s melange spice nearby,” he said.

An eider wind feathered Paul’s cheeks, ruffled the folds of his burnoose. But this wind carried no threat of storm; already he could sense the difference.

“Dawn soon,” he said.

Jessica nodded.

“There’s a way to get safely across that open sand,” Paul said. “The Fremen do it. ”

“The worms?”

“If we were to plant a thumper from our Fremkit back in the rocks here,” Paul said. “It’d keep a worm occupied for a time.”

She glanced at the stretch of moonlighted desert between them and the other escarpment. “Four kilometers worth of time?”

“Perhaps. And if we crossed there making only natural sounds, the kind that don’t attract the worms….”

Paul studied the open desert, questing in his prescient memory, probing the mysterious allusions to thumpers and maker hooks in the Fremkit manual that had come with their escape pack. He found it odd that all he sensed was pervasive terror at thought of the worms. He knew as though it lay just at the edge of his awareness that the worms were to be respected and not feared … if … if….

He shook his head.

“It’d have to be sounds without rhythm,” Jessica said.

“What? Oh. Yes. If we broke our steps … the sand itself must shift down at times. Worms can’t investigate every little sound. We should be fully rested before we try it, though.”

He looked across at that other rock wall, seeing the passage of time in the vertical moonshadows there. “It’ll be dawn within the hour.”

“Where’ll we spend the day?” she asked.

Paul turned left, pointed. “The cliff curves back north over there. You can see by the way it’s wind-cut that’s the windward face. There’ll be crevasses there, deep ones.”

“Had we better get started?” she asked.

He stood, helped her to her feet. “Are you rested enough for a climb down? I want to get as close as possible to the desert floor before we camp.”

“Enough.” She nodded for him to lead the way.

He hesitated, then lifted the pack, settled it onto his shoulders and turned along the cliff.

If only we had suspensors, Jessica thought. It’d be such a simple matter to jump down there. But perhaps suspensors are another thing to avoid in the open desert. Maybe they attract the worms the way a shield does.

They came to a series of shelves dropping down and, beyond them, saw a fissure with its ledge outlined by moonshadow leading along the vestibule.

Paul led the way down, moving cautiously but hurrying because it was obvious the moonlight could not last much longer. They wound down into a world of deeper and deeper shadows. Hints of rock shape climbed to the stars around them. The fissure narrowed to some ten meters’ width at the brink of a dim gray sandslope that slanted downward into darkness.

“Can we go down?” Jessica whispered.

“I think so.”

He tested the surface with one foot.

“We can slide down,” he said. “I’ll go first. Wait until you hear me stop.”

“Careful,” she said.

He stepped onto the slope and slid and slipped down its soft surface onto an almost level floor of packed sand. The place was deep within the rock walls.

There came the sound of sand sliding behind him. He tried to see up the slope in the darkness, was almost knocked over by the cascade. It trailed away to silence.

“Mother?” he said.

There was no answer.

“Mother?”

He dropped the pack, hurled himself up the slope, scrambling, digging, throwing sand like a wild man. “Mother!” he gasped. “Mother, where are you?”

Another cascade of sand swept down on him, burying him to the hips. He wrenched himself out of it.

She’s been caught in the sandslide, he thought. Buried in it. I must be calm and work this out carefully. She won’t smother immediately. She’ll compose herself in bindu suspension to reduce her oxygen needs. She knows I’ll dig for her.

In the Bene Gesserit way she had taught him, Paul stilled the savage beating of his heart, set his mind as a blank slate upon which the past few moments could write themselves. Every partial shift and twist of the slide replayed itself in his menory, moving with an interior stateliness that contrasted with the fractional second of real time required for the total recall.

Presently, Paul moved slantwise up the slope, probing cautiously until he found the wall of the fissure, an outcurve of rock there. He began to dig, moving the sand with care not to dislodge another slide. A piece of fabric came under his hands. He followed it, found an arm. Gently, he traced the arm, exposed her face.

“Do you hear me?” he whispered.

No answer.

He dug faster, freed her shoulders. She was limp beneath his hands, but he detected a slow heartbeat.

Bindu suspension, he told himself.

He cleared the sand away to her waist, draped her arms over his shoulders and pulled downslope, slowly at first, then dragging her as fast as he could, feeling the sand give way above. Faster and faster he pulled her, gasping with the effort, fighting to keep his balance. He was out on the hard-packed floor of the fissure then, swinging her to his shoulder and breaking into a staggering run as the entire sandslope came down with a loud hiss that echoed and was magnified within the rock walls.

He stopped at the end of the fissure where it looked out on the desert’s marching dunes some thirty meters below. Gently, he lowered her to the sand, uttered the word to bring her out of the catalepsis.

She awakened slowly, taking deeper and deeper breaths.

“I knew you’d find me,” she whispered.

He looked back up the fissure. “It might have been kinder if I hadn’t.”

“Paul!”

“I lost the pack,” he said. “It’s buried under a hundred tons of sand … at least.”

“Everything?”

“The spare water, the stilltent—everything that counts.” He touched a pocket. “I still have the paracompass.” He fumbled at the waist sash. “Knife and binoculars. We can get a good look around the place where we’ll die.”

In that instant, the sun lifted above the horizon somewhere to the left beyond the end of the fissure. Colors blinked in the sand out on the open desert. A chorus of birds held forth their songs from hidden places among the rocks.

But Jessica had eyes only for the despair in Paul’s face. She edged her voice with scorn, said: “Is this the way you were taught?”

“Don’t you understand?” he asked. “Everything we need to survive in this place is under that sand.”

“You found me,” she said, and now her voice was soft, reasonable.

Paul squatted back on his heels.

Presently, he looked up the fissure at the new slope, studying it, marking the looseness of the sand.

“If we could immobilize a small area of that slope and the upper face of a hole dug into the sand, we might be able to put down a shaft to the pack. Water might do it, but we don’t have enough water for….” He broke off, then: “Foam.”

Jessica held herself to stillness lest she disturb the hyperfunctioning of his mind.

Paul looked out at the open dunes, searching with his nostrils as well as his eyes, finding the direction and then centering his attention on a darkened patch of sand below them.

“Spice,” he said. “Its essence—highly alkaline. And I have the paracompass. Its power pack is acid-base.”

Jessica sat up straight against the rock.

Paul ignored her, leaped to his feet, and was off down the wind-compacted surface that spilled from the end of the fissure to the desert’s floor.

She watched the way he walked, breaking his stride—step … pause, step-step … slide … pause …

There was no rhythm to it that might tell a marauding worm something not of the desert moved here.

Paul reached the spice patch, shoveled a mound of it into a fold of his robe, returned to the fissure. He spilled the spice onto the sand in front of Jessica, squatted and began dismantling the paracompass, using the point of his knife. The compass face came off. He removed his sash, spread the compass parts on it, lifted out the power pack. The dial mechanism came out next, leaving an empty dished compartment in the instrument.

“You’ll need water,” Jessica said.

Paul took the catchtube from his neck, sucked up a mouthful, expelled it into the dished compartment.

If this fails, that’s water wasted, Jessica thought. But it won’t matter then, anyway.

With his knife, Paul cut open the power pack, spilled its crystals into the water. They foamed slightly, subsided.

Jessica’s eyes caught motion above them. She looked up to see a line of hawks along the rim of the fissure. They perched there staring down at the open water.

Great Mother! she thought. They can sense water even at that distance!

Paul had the cover back on the paracompass, leaving off the reset button which gave a small hole into the liquid. Taking the reworked instrument in one hand, a handful of spice in the other, Paul went back up the fissure, studying the lay of the slope. His robe billowed gently without the sash to hold it. He waded part way up the slope, kicking off the sand rivulets, spurts of dust.

Presently, he stopped, pressed a pinch of the spice into the paracompass, shook the instrument case.

Green foam boiled out of the hole where the reset button had been. Paul aimed it at the slope, spread a low dike there, began kicking away the sand beneath it, immobilizing the opened face with more foam.

Jessica moved to a position below him, called out: “May I help?”

“Come up and dig,” he said. “We’ve about three meters to go. It’s going to be a near thing.” As he spoke, the foam stopped billowing from the instrument.

“Quickly,” Paul said. “No telling how long this foam will hold the sand.”

Jessica scrambled up beside Paul as he sifted another pinch of spice into the hole, shook the paracompass case. Again, foam boiled from it.

As Paul directed the foam barrier, Jessica dug with her hands, hurling the sand down the slope. “How deep?” she panted.

“About three meters,” he said. “And I can only approximate the position. We may have to widen this hole.” He moved a step aside, slipping in loose sand. “Slant your digging backward. Don’t go straight down.”

Jessica obeyed.

Slowly, the hole went down, reaching a level even with the floor of the basin and still no sign of the pack.

Could I have miscalculated? Paul asked himself. I’m the one that panicked originally and caused this mistake. Has that warped my ability?

He looked at the paracompass. Less than two ounces of the acid infusion remained.

Jessica straightened in the hole, rubbed a foam-stained hand across her cheek. Her eyes met Paul’s.

“The upper face,” Paul said. “Gently, now.” He added another pinch of spice to the container, sent the foam boiling around Jessica’s hands as she began cutting a vertical face in the upper slant of the hole. On the second pass, her hands encountered something hard. Slowly, she worked out a length of strap with a plastic buckle.

“Don’t move any more of it,” Paul said and his voice was almost a whisper.

“We’re out of foam.”

Jessica held the strap in one hand, looked up at him.

Paul threw the empty paracompass down onto the floor of the basin, said: “Give me your other hand. Now listen carefully. I’m going to pull you to the side and downhill. Don’t let go of that strap. We won’t get much more spill from the top. This slope has stabilized itself. All I’m going to aim for is to keep your head free of the sand. Once that hole’s filled, we can dig you out and pull up the pack.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Ready?”

“Ready.” She tensed her fingers on the strap.

With one surge, Paul had her half out of the hole, holding her head up as the foam barrier gave way and sand spilled down. When it had subsided, Jessica remained buried to the waist, her left arm and shoulder still under the sand, her chin protected on a fold of Paul’s robe. Her shoulder ached from the strain put on it.

“I still have the strap,” she said.

Slowly, Paul worked his hand into the sand beside her, found the strap. “Together,” he said. “Steady pressure. We mustn’t break it.”

More sand spilled down as they worked the pack up. When the strap cleared the surface, Paul stopped, freed his mother from the sand. Together then they pulled the pack downslope and out of its trap.

In a few minutes they stood on the floor of the fissure holding the pack between them.

Paul looked at his mother. Foam strained her face, her robe. Sand was caked to her where the foam had dried. She looked as though she had been a target for balls of wet, green sand.

“You look a mess,” he said.

“You’re not so pretty yourself,” she said.

They started to laugh, then sobered.

“That shouldn’t have happened,” Paul said. “I was careless.”

She shrugged, feeling caked sand fall away from her robe.

“I’ll put up the tent,” he said. “Better slip off that robe and shake it out.” He turned away, taking the pack.

Jessica nodded, suddenly too tired to answer.

“There’s anchor holes in the rock,” Paul said. “Someone’s tented here before.”

Why not? she thought as she brushed at her robe. This was a likely place—deep in rock walls and facing another cliff some four kilometers away—far enough above the desert to avoid worms but close enough for easy access before a crossing.

She turned, seeing that Paul had the tent up, its rib-domed hemisphere blending with the rock walls of the fissure. Paul stepped past her, lifting his binoculars. He adjusted their internal pressure with a quick twist, focused the oil lenses on the other cliff, lifting golden tan in morning light across open sand.

Jessica watched as he studied that apocalyptic landscape, his eyes probing into sand rivers and canyons.

“There are growing things over there,” he said.

Jessica found the spare binoculars in the pack beside the tent, moved up beside Paul.

“There,” he said, holding the binoculars with one hand and pointing with the other.

She looked where he pointed.

“Saguaro,” she said. “Scrawny stuff.”

“There may be people nearby,” Paul said.

“That could be the remains of a botanical testing station,” she warned.

“This is pretty far south into the desert,” he said. He lowered his binoculars, rubbed beneath his filter baffle, feeling how dry and chapped his lips were, sensing the dusty taste of thirst in his mouth. “This has the feeling of a Fremen place,” he said.

“Are we certain the Fremen will be friendly?” she asked.

“Kynes promised their help.”

But there’s desperation in the people of this desert, she thought. I felt some of it myself today. Desperate people might kill us for our water.

She closed her eyes and, against this wasteland, conjured in her mind a scene from Caladan. There had been a vacation trip once on Caladan—she and the Duke Leto, before Paul’s birth. They’d flown over the southern jungles, above the weed-wild shouting leaves and rice paddies of the deltas. And they had seen the ant lines in the greenery—man-gangs carrying their loads on suspensor-buoyed shoulder poles. And in the sea reaches there’d been the white petals of trimaran dhows.

All of it gone.

Jessica opened her eyes to the desert stillness, to the mounting warmth of the day. Restless heat devils were beginning to set the air aquiver out on the open sand. The other rock face across from them was like a thing seen through cheap glass.

A spill of sand spread its brief curtain across the open end of the fissure. The sand hissed down, loosed by puffs of morning breeze, by the hawks that were beginning to lift away from the clifftop. When the sand-fall was gone, she still heard it hissing. It grew louder, a sound that once heard, was never forgotten.

“Worm,” Paul whispered.

It came from their right with an uncaring majesty that could not be ignored. A twisting burrow-mound of sand cut through the dunes within their field of vision. The mound lifted in front, dusting away like a bow wave in water. Then it was gone, coursing off to the left.

The sound diminished, died.

“I’ve seen space frigates that were smaller,” Paul whispered.

She nodded, continuing to stare across the desert. Where the worm had passed there remained that tantalizing gap. It flowed bitterly endless before them, beckoning beneath its horizontal collapse of skyline.

“When we’ve rested,” Jessica said, “we should continue with your lessons.”

He suppressed a sudden anger, said: “Mother, don’t you think we could do without….”

“Today you panicked,” she said. “You know your mind and bindu-nervature perhaps better than I do, but you’ve much yet to learn about your body’s prana-musculature. The body does things of itself sometimes, Paul, and I can teach you about this. You must learn to control every muscle, every fiber of your body. You need review of the hands. We’ll start with finger muscles, palm tendons, and tip sensitivity.” She turned away. “Come, into the tent, now.”

He flexed the fingers of his left hand, watching her crawl through the sphincter valve, knowing that he could not deflect her from this determination … that he must agree.

Whatever has been done to me, I’ve been a party to it, he thought.

Review of the hand!

He looked at his hand. How inadequate it appeared when measured against such creatures as that worm.

***

“SO YOU’RE the great Gurney Halleck,” the man said.

Halleck stood staring across the round cavern office at the smuggler seated behind a metal desk. The man wore Fremen robes and had the half-tint blue eyes that told of off-planet foods in his diet. The office duplicated a space frigate’s master control center—communications and viewscreens along a thirty-degree arc of wall, remote arming and firing banks adjoining, and the desk formed as a wall projection—part of the remaining curve.

“I am Staban Tuek, son of Esmar Tuek,” the smuggler said.

“Then you’re the one I owe thanks for the help we’ve received,” Halleck said.

“Ah-h-h, gratitude,” the smuggler said. “Sit down.”

A ship-type bucket seat emerged from the wall beside the screens and Halleck sank onto it with a sigh, feeling his weariness. He could see his own reflection now in a dark surface beside the smuggler and scowled at the lines of fatigue in his lumpy face. The inkvine scar along his jaw writhed with the scowl.

Halleck turned from his reflection, stared at Tuek. He saw the family resemblance in the smuggler now—the father’s heavy, overhanging eyebrows and rock planes of cheeks and nose.

“Your men tell me your father is dead, killed by the Harkonnens,” Halleck said.

“By the Harkonnens or by a traitor among your people,” Tuek said.

Anger overcame part of Halleck’s fatigue. He straightened, said: “Can you name the traitor?”

“We are not sure.”

“Thufir Hawat suspected the Lady Jessica.”

“Ah-h-h, the Bene Gesserit witch … perhaps. But Hawat is now a Harkonnen captive.”

“I heard,” Halleck took a deep breath. “It appears we’ve a deal more killing ahead of us.”

“We will do nothing to attract attention to us,” Tuek said.

Halleck stiffened. “But—”

“You and those of your men we’ve saved are welcome to sanctuary among us,” Tuek said. “You speak of gratutude. Very well; work off your debt to us. We can always use good men. We’ll destroy you out of hand, though, if you make the slightest open move against the Harkonnens.”

“But they killed your father, man!”

“Perhaps. And if so, I’ll give you my father’s answer to those who act without thinking: ‘A stone is heavy and the sand is weighty; but a fool’s wrath is heavier than them both.’ ”

“You mean to do nothing about it, then?” Halleck sneered.

“You did not hear me say that. I merely say I will protect our contract with the Guild. The Guild requires that we play a circumspect game. There are other ways of destroying a foe.”

“Ah-h-h-h-h.”

“Ah, indeed. If you’ve a mind to seek out the witch, have at it. But I warn you that you’re probably too late … and we doubt she’s the one you want, anyway.”

“Hawat made few mistakes.”

“He allowed himself to fall into Harkonnen hands.”

“You think he’s the traitor?”

Tuek shrugged. “This is academic. We think the witch is dead. At least the Harkonnens believe it.”

“You seem to know a great deal about the Harkonnens.”

“Hints and suggestions … rumors and hunches.”

“We are seventy-four men,” Halleck said. “If you seriously wish us to enlist with you, you must believe our Duke is dead.”

“His body has been seen.”

“And the boy, too—young Master Paul?” Halleck tried to swallow, found a lump in his throat.

“According to the last word we had, he was lost with his mother in a desert storm. Likely not even their bones will ever be found.”

“So the witch is dead then … all dead.”

Tuek nodded. “And Beast Rabban, so they say, will sit once more in the seat of power here on Dune.”

“The Count Rabban of Lankiveil?”

“Yes.”

It took Halleck a moment to put down the upsurge of rage that threatened to overcome him. He spoke with panting breath: “I’ve a score of my own against Rabban. I owe him for the lives of my family….” He rubbed at the scar along his jaw. “… and for this….”

“One does not risk everything to settle a score prematurely,” Tuek said. He frowned, watching the play of muscles along Halleck’s jaw, the sudden withdrawal in the man’s shed-lidded eyes.

“I know … I know.” Halleck took a deep breath.

“You and your men can work out your passage off Arrakis by serving with us. There are many places to—”

“I release my men from any bond to me; they can choose for themselves. With Rabban here—I stay.”

“In your mood, I’m not sure we want you to stay.”

Halleck stared at the smuggler. “You doubt my word?”

“No-o-o….”

“You’ve saved me from the Harkonnens. I gave loyalty to the Duke Leto for no greater reason. I’ll stay on Arrakis—with you … or with the Fremen.”

“Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and it has power,” Tuek said. “You might find the line between life and death among the Fremen to be too sharp and quick.”

Halleck closed his eyes briefly, feeling the weariness surge up in him. “Where is the Lord who led us through the land of deserts and of pits?” he murmured.

“Move slowly and the day of your revenge will come,” Tuek said. “Speed is a device of Shaitan. Cool your sorrow—we’ve the diversions for it; three things there are that ease the heart—water, green grass, and the beauty of woman.”

Halleck opened his eyes. “I would prefer the blood of Rabban Harkonnen flowing about my feet.” He stared at Tuek. “You think that day will come?”

“I have little to do with how you’ll meet tomorrow, Gurney Halleck. I can only help you meet today.”

“Then I’ll accept that help and stay until the day you tell me to revenge your father and all the others who—”

“Listen to me, fighting man,” Tuek said. He leaned forward over his desk, his shoulders level with his ears, eyes intent. The smuggler’s face was suddenly like weathered stone. “My father’s water—I’ll buy that back myself, with my own blade.”

Halleck stared back at Tuek. In that moment, the smuggler reminded him of Duke Leto: a leader of men, courageous, secure in his own position and his own course. He was like the Duke … before Arrakis.

“Do you wish my blade beside you?” Halleck asked.

Tuek sat back, relaxed, studying Halleck silently.

“Do you think of me as fighting man?” Halleck pressed.

“You’re the only one of the Duke’s lieutenants to escape,” Tuek said. “Your enemy was overwhelming, yet you rolled with him…. You defeated him the way we defeat Arrakis.”

“Eh?”

“We live on sufferance down here, Gurney Halleck,” Tuek said. “Arrakis is our enemy.”

“One enemy at a time, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“Is that the way the Fremen make out?”

“Perhaps.”

“You said I might find life with the Fremen too tough. They live in the desert, in the open, is that why?”

“Who knows where the Fremen live? For us, the Central Plateau is a no-man’s land. But I wish to talk more about—”

“I’m told that the Guild seldom routes spice lighters in over the desert,” Halleck said. “But there are rumors that you can see bits of greenery here and there if you know where to look.”

“Rumors!” Tuek sneered. “Do you wish to choose now between me and the Fremen? We have a measure of security, our own sietch carved out of the rock, our own hidden basins. We live the lives of civilized men. The Fremen are a few ragged bands that we use as spice-hunters.”

“But they can kill Harkonnens.”

“And do you wish to know the result? Even now they are being hunted down like animals—with lasguns, because they have no shields. They are being exterminated. Why? Because they killed Harkonnens.”

“Was it Harkonnens they killed?” Halleck asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Haven’t you heard that there may’ve been Sardaukar with the Harkonnens?”

“More rumors.”

“But a pogrom—that isn’t like the Harkonnens. A pogrom is wasteful.”

“I believe what I see with my own eyes,” Tuek said. “Make your choice, fighting man. Me or the Fremen. I will promise you sanctuary and a chance to draw the blood we both want. Be sure of that. The Fremen will offer you only the life of the hunted.”

Halleck hesitated, sensing wisdom and sympathy in Tuek’s words, yet troubled for no reason he could explain.

“Trust your own abilities,” Tuek said. “Whose decisions brought your force through the battle? Yours. Decide.”

“It must be,” Halleck said. “The Duke and his son are dead?”

“The Harkonnens believe it. Where such things are concerned, I incline to trust the Harkonnens.” A grim smile touched Tuek’s mouth. “But it’s about the only trust I give them.”

“Then it must be,” Halleck repeated. He held out his right hand, palm up and thumb folded flat against it in the traditional gesture. “I give you my sword.”

“Accepted.”

“Do you wish me to persuade my men?”

“You’d let them make their own decision?”

“They’ve followed me this far, but most are Caladan-born. Arrakis isn’t what they thought it’d be. Here, they’ve lost everything except their lives. I’d prefer they decided for themselves now.”

“Now is no time for you to falter,” Tuek said. “They’ve followed you this far.”

“You need them, is that it?”

“We can always use experienced fighting men … in these times more than ever.”

“You’ve accepted my sword. Do you wish me to persuade them?”

“I think they’ll follow you, Gurney Halleck.”

“’Tis to be hoped.”

“Indeed.”

“I may make my own decision in this, then?”

“Your own decision.”

Halleck pushed himself up from the bucket seat, feeling how much of his reserve strength even that small effort required. “For now, I’ll see to their quarters and well-being,” he said.

“Consult my quartermaster,” Tuek said. “Drisq is his name. Tell him it’s my wish that you receive every courtesy. I’ll join you myself presently. I’ve some off-shipments of spice to see to first.”

“Fortune passes everywhere,” Halleck said.

“Everywhere,” Tuek said. “A time of upset is a rare opportunity for our business.”

Halleck nodded, heard the faint sussuration and felt the air shift as a lockport swung open beside him. He turned, ducked through it and out of the office.

He found himself in the assembly hall through which he and his men had been led by Tuek’s aides. It was a long, fairly narrow area chewed out of the native rock, it’s smooth surface betraying the use of cutteray burners for the job. The ceiling stretched away high enough to continue the natural supporting curve of the rock and to permit internal air-convection currents. Weapons racks and lockers lined the walls.

Halleck noted with a touch of pride that those of his men still able to stand were standing—no relaxation in weariness and defeat for them. Smuggler medics were moving among them tending the wounded. Litter cases were assembled in one area down to the left, each wounded man with an Atreides companion.

The Atreides training—“We care for our own!”—it held like a core of native rock in them, Halleck noted.

One of his lieutenants stepped forward carrying Halleck’s nine-string baliset out of its case. The man snapped a salute, said: “Sir, the medics here say there’s no hope for Mattai. They have no bone and organ banks here—only outpost medicine. Mattai can’t last, they say, and he has a request of you.”

“What is it?”

The lieutenant thrust the baliset forward. “Mattai wants a song to ease his going, sir. He says you’ll know the one … he’s asked it of you often enough.” The lieutenant swallowed. “It’s the one called ‘My Woman,’ sir. If you—”

“I know.” Halleck took the baliset, flicked the multipick out of its catch on the fingerboard. He drew a soft chord from the instrument, found that someone had already tuned it. There was a burning in his eyes, but he drove that out of his thoughts as he strolled forward, strumming the tune, forcing himself to smile casually.

Several of his men and a smuggler medic were bent over one of the litters. One of the men began singing softly as Halleck approached, catching the counter-beat with the ease of long familiarity:

The singer stopped, reached out a bandaged arm and closed the eyelids of the man on the litter.

Halleck drew a final soft chord from the baliset, thinking: Now we are seventy-three.

***

PAUL STOOD outside the stilltent in the late afternoon. The crevasse where he had pitched their camp lay in deep shadow. He stared out across the open sand at the distant cliff, wondering if he should waken his mother, who lay asleep in the tent.

Folds upon folds of dunes spread beyond their shelter. Away from the setting sun, the dunes exposed greased shadows so black they were like bits of night.

And the flatness.

His mind searched for something tall in that landscape. But there was no persuading tallness out of heat-addled air and that horizon—no bloom or gently shaken thing to mark the passage of a breeze … only dunes and that distant cliff beneath a sky of burnished silver-blue.

What if there isn’t one of the abandoned testing stations across there? he wondered. What if there are no Fremen, either, and the plants we see are only an accident?

Within the tent, Jessica awakened, turned onto her back and peered sidelong out the transparent end at Paul. He stood with his back to her and something about his stance reminded her of his father. She sensed the well of grief rising within her and turned away.

Presently she adjusted her stillsuit, refreshed herself with water from the tent’s catchpocket, and slipped out to stand and stretch the sleep from her muscles.

Paul spoke without turning: “I find myself enjoying the quiet here.”

How the mind gears itself for its environment, she thought. And she recalled a Bene Gesserit axiom: “The mind can go either direction under stress—towardpositive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training. ”

“It could be a good life here,” Paul said.

She tried to see the desert through his eyes, seeking to encompass all the rigors this planet accepted as commonplace, wondering at the possible futures Paul had glimpsed. One could be alone out here, she thought, without fear of someone behind you, without fear of the hunter.

She stepped past Paul, lifted her binoculars, adjusted the oil lenses and studied the escarpment across from them. Yes, saguaro in the arroyos and other spiny growth … and a matting of low grasses, yellow-green in the shadows.

“I’ll strike camp,” Paul said.

Jessica nodded, walked to the fissure’s mouth where she could get a sweep of the desert, and swung her binoculars to the left. A salt pan glared white there with a blending of dirty tan at its edges—a field of white out here where white was death. But the pan said another thing: water. At some time water had flowed across that glaring white. She lowered her binoculars, adjusted her burnoose, listened for a moment to the sound of Paul’s movements.

The sun dipped lower. Shadows stretched across the salt pan. Lines of wild color spread over the sunset horizon. Color streamed into a toe of darkness testing the sand. Coal-colored shadows spread, and the thick collapse of night blotted the desert.

Stars!

She stared up at them, sensing Paul’s movements as he came up beside her. The desert night focused upward with a feeling of lift toward the stars. The weight of the day receded. There came a brief flurry of breeze across her face.

“The first moon will be up soon,” Paul said. “The pack’s ready. I’ve planted the thumper.”

We could be lost forever in this hellplace, she thought. And no one to know.

The night wind spread sand runnels that grated across her face, bringing the smell of cinnamon: a shower of odors in the dark.

“Smell that,” Paul said.

“I can smell it even through the filter,” she said. “Riches. But will it buy water?” She pointed across the basin. “There are no artificial lights across there.”

“Fremen would be hidden in a sietch behind those rocks,” he said.

A sill of silver pushed above the horizon to their right: the first moon. It lifted into view, the hand pattern plain on its face. Jessica studied the white-silver of sand exposed in the light.

“I planted the thumper in the deepest part of the crevasse,” Paul said. “Whenever I light its candle it’ll give us about thirty minutes.”

“Thirty minutes?”

“Before it starts calling … a … worm.”

“Oh. I’m ready to go.”

He slipped away from her side and she heard his progress back up their fissure.

The night is a tunnel, she thought, a hole into tomorrow … if we’re to have a tomorrow. She shook her head. Why must I be so morbid? I was trained better than that!

Paul returned, took up the pack, led the way down to the first spreading dune where he stopped and listened as his mother came up behind him. He heard her soft progress and the cold single-grain dribbles of sound—the desert’s own code spelling out its measure of safety.

“We must walk without rhythm,” Paul said and he called up memory of men walking the sand … both prescient memory and real memory.

“Watch how I do it,” he said. “This is how Fremen walk the sand.”

He stepped out onto the windward face of the dune, following the curve of it, moved with a dragging pace.

Jessica studied his progress for ten steps, followed, imitating him. She saw the sense of it: they must sound like the natural shifting of sand … like the wind. But muscles protested this unnatural, broken pattern: Step … drag … drag … step … step … wait… drag … step …

Time stretched out around them. The rock face ahead seemed to grow no nearer. The one behind still towered high.

“Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!”

It was a drumming from the cliff behind.

“The thumper,” Paul hissed.

Its pounding continued and the found difficulty avoiding the rhythm of it in their stride.

“Lump … lump … lump … lump….”

They moved in a moonlit bowl punctured by that hollowed thumping. Down and up through spilling dunes: step … drag … wait … step…. Across pea sand that rolled under their feet: drag … wait … step….

And all the while their ears searched for a special hissing.

The sound, when it came, started so low that their own dragging passage masked it. But it grew … louder and louder … out of the west.

“Lump … lump … lump … lump….” drummed the thumper.

The hissing approach spread across the night behind them. They turned their heads as they walked, saw the mound of the coursing worm.

“Keep moving,” Paul whispered. “Don’t look back.”

A grating sound of fury exploded from the rock shadows they had left. It was a flailing avalanche of noise.

“Keep moving,” Paul repeating.

He saw that they had reached an unmarked point where the two rock faces—the one ahead and the one behind—appeared equally remote.

And still behind them, that whipping, frenzied tearing of rocks dominated the night.

They moved on and on and on…. Muscles reached a stage of mechanical aching that seemed to stretch out indefinitely, but Paul saw that the beckoning escarpment ahead of them had climbed higher.

Jessica moved in a void of concentration, aware that the pressure of her will alone kept her walking. Dryness ached in her mouth, but the sounds behind drove away all hope of stopping for a sip from her stillsuit’s catchpockets.

“Lump … lump….”

Renewed frenzy erupted from the distant cliff, drowning out the thumper.

Silence!

“Faster,” Paul whispered.

She nodded, knowing he did not see the gesture, but needing the action to tell herself that it was necessary to demand even more from muscles that already were being taxed to their limits—the unnatural movement….

The rock face of safety ahead of them climbed into the stars, and Paul saw a plane of flat sand stretching out at the base. He stepped onto it, stumbled in his fatigue, righted himself with an involuntary out-thrusting of a foot.

Resonant booming shook the sand around them.

Paul lurched sideways two steps.

“Boom! Boom!”

“Drum sand!” Jessica hissed.

Paul recovered his balance. A sweeping glance took in the sand around them, the rock escarpment perhaps two hundred meters away.

Behind them, he heard a hissing—like the wind, like a riptide where there was no water.

“Run!” Jessica screamed. “Paul, run!”

They ran.

Drum sound boomed beneath their feet. Then they were out of it and into pea gravel. For a time, the running was a relief to muscles that ached from unfamiliar, rhythmless use. Here was action that could be understood. Here was rhythm. But sand and gravel dragged at their feet. And the hissing approach of the worm was storm sound that grew around them.

Jessica stumbled to her knees. All she could think of was the fatigue and the sound and the terror.

Paul dragged her up.

They ran on, hand in hand.

A thin pole jutted from the sand ahead of them. They passed it, saw another.

Jessica’s mind failed to register on the poles until they were past.

There was another-wind-etched surface thrust up from a crack in rock.

Another.

Rock!

She felt it through her feet, the shock of unresisting surface, gained new strength from the firmer footing.

A deep crack stretched its vertical shadow upward into the cliff ahead of them. They sprinted for it, crowded into the narrow hole.

Behind them, the sound of the worm’s passage stopped.

Jessica and Paul turned, peered out onto the desert.

Where the dunes began, perhaps fifty meters away at the foot of a rock beach, a silver-gray curve broached from the desert, sending rivers of sand and dust cascading all around. It lifted higher, resolved into a giant, questing mouth. It was a round, black hole with edges glistening in the moonlight.

The mouth snaked toward the narrow crack where Paul and Jessica huddled. Cinnamon yelled in their nostrils. Moonlight flashed from crystal teeth.

Back and forth the great mouth wove.

Paul stilled his breathing.

Jessica crouched staring.

It took intense concentration of her Bene Gesserit training to put down the primal terrors, subduing a race-memory fear that threatened to fill her mind.

Paul felt a kind of elation. In some recent instant, he had crossed a time barrier into more unknown territory. He could sense the darkness ahead, nothing revealed to his inner eye. It was as though some step he had taken had plunged him into a well … or into the trough of a wave where the future was invisible. The landscape had undergone a profound shifting.

Instead of frightening him, the sensation of time-darkness forced a hyper-acceleration of his other senses. He found himself registering every available aspect of the thing that lifted from the sand there seeking him. Its mouth was some eighty meters in diameter … crystal teeth with the curved shape of crysknives glinting around the rim … the bellows breath of cinnamon, subtle aldehydes … acids….

The worm blotted out the moonlight as it brushed the rocks above them. A shower of small stones and sand cascaded into the narrow hiding place.

Paul crowded his mother farther back.

Cinnamon!

The smell of it flooded across him.

What has the worm to do with the spice, melange? he asked himself. And he remembered Liet-Kynes betraying a veiled reference to some association between worm and spice.

“Barrrroooom!”

It was like a peal of dry thunder coming from far off to their right.

Again: “Barrrroooom!”

The worm drew back onto the sand, lay there momentarily, its crystal teeth weaving moonflashes.

“Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!”

Another thumper! Paul thought.

Again it sounded off to their right.

A shudder passed through the worm. It drew farther away into the sand. Only a mounded upper curve remained like half a bell mouth, the curve of a tunnel rearing above the dunes.

Sand rasped.

The creature sank farther, retreating, turning. It became a mound of cresting sand that curved away through a saddle in the dunes.

Paul stepped out of the crack, watched the sand wave recede across the waste toward the new thumper summons.

Jessica followed, listening: “Lump … lump … lump … lump … lump….”

Presently the sound stopped.

Paul found the tube into his stillsuit, sipped at the reclaimed water.

Jessica focused on his action, but her mind felt blank with fatigue and the aftermath of terror. “Has it gone for sure?” she whispered.

“Somebody called it,” Paul said. “Fremen.”

She felt herself recovering. “It was so big!”

“Not as as big as the one that got our ’thopter.”

“Are you sure it was Fremen?”

“They used a thumper.”

“Why would they help us?”

“Maybe they weren’t helping us. Maybe they were just calling a worm.”

“Why?”

An answer lay poised at the edge of his awareness, but refused to come. He had a vision in his mind of something to do with the telescoping barbed sticks in their packs—the “maker hooks.”

“Why would they call a worm?” Jessica asked.

A breath of fear touched his mind, and he forced himself to turn away from his mother, to look up the cliff. “We’d better find a way up there before daylight.” He pointed. “Those poles we passed—there are more of them.”

She looked, following the line of his hand, saw the poles—wind-scratched markers—made out the shadow of a narrow ledge that twisted into a crevasse high above them.

“They mark a way up the cliff,” Paul said. He settled his shoulders into the pack, crossed to the foot of the ledge and began the climb upward.

Jessica waited a moment, resting, restoring her strength; then she followed.

Up they climbed, following the guide poles until the ledge dwindled to a narrow lip at the mouth of a dark crevasse.

Paul tipped his head to peer into the shadowed place. He could feel the precarious hold his feet had on the slender ledge, but forced himself to slow caution. He saw only darkness within the crevasse. It stretched away upward, open to the stars at the top. His ears searched, found only sounds he could expect—a tiny spill of sand, an insect brrr, the patter of a small running creature. He tested the darkness in the crevasse with one foot, found rock beneath a gritting surface. Slowly, he inched around the corner, signaled for his mother to follow. He grasped a loose edge of her robe, helped her around.

They looked upward at starlight framed by two rock lips. Paul saw his mother beside him as a cloudy gray movement. “If we could only risk a light,” he whispered.

“We have other senses than eyes,” she said.

Paul slid a foot forward, shifted his weight, and probed with the other foot, met an obstruction. He lifted his foot, found a step, pulled himself up onto it. He reached back, felt his mother’s arm, tugged at her robe for her to follow.

Another step.

“It goes on up to the top, I think,” he whispered.

Shallow and even steps, Jessica thought. Man-carved beyond a doubt.

She followed the shadowy movement of Paul’s progress, feeling out the steps. Rock walls narrowed until her shoulders almost brushed them. The steps ended in a slitted defile about twenty meters long, its floor level, and this opened onto a shallow, moonlit basin.

Paul stepped out into the rim of the basin, whispered: “What a beautiful place.”

Jessica could only stare in silent agreement from her position a step behind him.

In spite of weariness, the irritation of recaths and nose plugs and the confinement of the stillsuit, in spite of fear and the aching desire for rest, this basin’s beauty filled her senses, forcing her to stop and admire it.

“Like a fairyland,” Paul whispered.

Jessica nodded.

Spreading away in front of her stretched desert growth—bushes, cacti, tiny clumps of leaves—all trembling in the moonlight. The ringwalls were dark to her left, moonfrosted on her right.

“This must be a Fremen place,” Paul said.

“There would have to be people for this many plants to survive,” she agreed. She uncapped the tube to her stillsuit’s catchpockets, sipped at it. Warm, faintly acrid wetness slipped down her throat. She marked how it refreshed her. The tube’s cap grated against flakes of sand as she replaced it.

Movement caught Paul’s attention—to his right and down on the basin floor curving out beneath them. He stared down through smoke bushes and weeds into a wedged slab sand-surface of moonlight inhabited by an up-hop, jump, pop-hop of tiny motion.

“Mice!” he hissed.

Pop-hop-hop! they went, into shadows and out.

Something fell soundlessly past their eyes into the mice. There came a thin screech, a flapping of wings, and a ghostly gray bird lifted away across the basin with a small, dark shadow in its talons.

We needed that reminder, Jessica thought.

Paul continued to stare across the basin. He inhaled, sensed the softly cutting contralto smell of sage climbing the night. The predatory bird—he thought of it as the way of this desert. It had brought a stillness to the basin so unuttered that the blue-milk moonlight could almost be heard flowing across sentinel saguaro and spiked paintbush. There was a low humming of light here more basic in its harmony than any other music in his universe.

“We’d better find a place to pitch the tent,” he said. “Tomorrow we can try to find the Fremen who—”

“Most intruders here regret finding the Fremen!”

It was a heavy masculine voice chopping across his words, shattering the moment. The voice came from above them and to their right.

“Please do not run, intruders,” the voice said as Paul made to withdraw into the defile. “If you run you’ll only waste your body’s water.”

They want us for the water of our flesh! Jessica thought. Her muscles overrode all fatigue, flowed into maximum readiness without external betrayal. She pinpointed the location of the voice, thinking: Such stealth! I didn’t hear him. And she realized that the owner of that voice had permitted himself only the small sounds, the natural sounds of the desert.

Another voice called from the basin’s rim to their left. “Make it quick, Stil. Get their water and let’s be on our way. We’ve little enough time before dawn.”

Paul, less conditioned to emergency response than his mother, felt chagrin that he had stiffened and tried to withdraw, that he had clouded his abilities by a momentary panic. He forced himself now to obey her teachings: relax, than fall into the semblance of relaxation, then into the arrested whipsnap of muscles that can slash in any direction.

Still, he felt the edge of fear within him and knew its source. This was blind time, no future he had seen … and they were caught between wild Fremen whose only interest was the water carried in the flesh of two unshielded bodies.

***

THE MAN crawled across a dunetop. He was a mote caught in the glare of the noon sun. He was dressed only in torn remnants of a jubba cloak, his skin bare to the heat through the tatters. The hood had been ripped from the cloak, but the man had fashioned a turban from a torn strip of cloth. Wisps of sandy hair protruded from it, matched by a sparse beard and thick brows. Beneath the blue-within-blue eyes, remains of a dark stain spread down to his cheeks. A matted depression across mustache and beard showed where a stillsuit tube had marked out its path from nose to catchpockets.

The man stopped half across the dunecrest, arms stretched down the slipface. Blood had clotted on his back and on his arms and legs. Patches of yellow-gray sand clung to the wounds. Slowly, he brought his hands under him, pushed himself to his feet, stood there swaying. And even in this almost-random action there remained a trace of once-precise movement.

“I am Liet-Kynes,” he said, addressing himself to the empty horizon, and his voice was a hoarse caricature of the strength it had known. “I am His Imperial Majesty’s Planetologist,” he whispered, “planetary ecologist for Arrakis. I am steward of this land.”

He stumbled, fell sideways along the crusty surface of the windward face. His hands dug feebly into the sand.

I am steward of this sand, he thought.

He realized that he was semi-delirious, that he should dig himself into the sand, find the relatively cool underlayer and cover himself with it. But he could still smell the rank, semisweet esthers of a pre-spice pocket somewhere underneath this sand. He knew the peril within this fact more certainly than any other Fremen. If he could smell the pre-spice mass, that meant the gasses deep under the sand were nearing explosive pressure. He had to get away from here.

His hands made weak scrabbling motions along the dune face.

A thought spread across his mind—clear, distinct: The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape, how we take part in that basic source of civilization—agriculture.

And he thought how strange it was that the mind, long fixed on a single track, could not get off that track. The Harkonnen troopers had left him here without water or stillsuit, thinking a worm would get him if the desert didn’t. They had thought it amusing to leave him alive to die by inches at the impersonal hands of his planet.

The Harkonnens always did find it difficult to kill Fremen, he thought. We don’t die easily. I should be dead now … I will be dead soon … but I can’t stop being an ecologist.

“The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.”

The voice shocked him because he recognized it and knew the owner of it was dead. It was the voice of his father who had been planetologist here before him—his father long dead, killed in the cave-in at Plaster Basin.

“Got yourself into quite a fix here, Son,” his father said. “You should’ve known the consequences of trying to help the child of that Duke.”

I’m delirious, Kynes thought.

The voice seemed to come from his right. Kynes scraped his face through sand, turning to look in that direction—nothing except a curving stretch of dune dancing with heat devils in the full glare of the sun.

“The more life there is within a system, the more niches there are for life,” his father said. And the voice came now from his left, from behind him.

Why does he keep moving around? Kynes asked himself. Doesn’t he want me to see him?

“Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life,” his father said. “Life makes needed nutrients more readily available. It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay from organism to organism.”

Why does he keep harping on the same subject? Kynes asked himself. I knew that before I was ten.

Desert hawks, carrion-eaters in this land as were most wild creatures, began to circle over him. Kynes saw a shadow pass near his hand, forced his head farther around to look upward. The birds were a blurred patch on silver-blue sky—distant flecks of soot floating above him.

“We are generalists,” his father said. “You can’t draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.”

What’s he trying to tell me? Kynes wondered. Is there some consequence I failed to see?

His cheek slumped back against the hot sand, and he smelled the burned rock odor beneath the pre-spice gasses. From some corner of logic in his mind, a thought formed: Those are carrion-eater birds over me. Perhaps some of my Fremen will see them and come to investigate.

“To the working planetologist, his most important tool is human beings,” his father said. “You must cultivate ecological literacy among the people. That’s why I’ve created this entirely new form of ecological notation.”

He’s repeating things he said to me when I was a child, Kynes thought.

He began to feel cool, but that corner of logic in his mind told him: The sun is overhead. You have no stillsuit and you’re hot; the sun is burning the moisture out of your body.

His fingers clawed feebly at the sand.

They couldn’t even leave me a stillsuit!

“The presence of moisture in the air helps prevent too-rapid evaporation from living bodies,” his father said.

Why does he keep repeating the obvious? Kynes wondered.

He tried to think of moisture in the air—grass covering this dune … open water somewhere beneath him, a long qanat flowing with water open to the sky except in text illustrations. Open water … irrigation water … it took five thousand cubic meters of water to irrigate one hectare of land per growing season, he remembered.

“Our first goal on Arrakis,” his father said, “is grassland provinces. We will start with these mutated poverty grasses. When we have moisture locked in grasslands, we’ll move on to start upland forests, then a few open bodies of water—small at first—and situated along lines of prevailing winds with windtrap moisture precipitators spaced in the lines to recapture what the wind steals. We must create a true sirocco—a moist wind—but we will never get away from the necessity for windtraps.”

Always lecturing me, Kynes thought. Why doesn’t he shut up? Can’t he see I’m dying?

“You will die, too,” his father said, “if you don’t get off the bubble that’s forming right now deep underneath you. It’s there and you know it. You can smell the pre-spice gasses. You know the little makers are beginning to lose some of their water into the mass.”

The thought of that water beneath him was maddening. He imagined it now—sealed off in strata of porous rock by the leathery half-plant, half-animal little makers—and the thin rupture that was pouring a cool stream of clearest, pure, liquid, soothing water into….

A pre-spice mass!

He inhaled, smelling the rank sweetness. The odor was much richer around him than it had been.

Kynes pushed himself to his knees, heard a bird screech, the hurried flapping of wings.

This is spice desert, he thought. There must be Fremen about even in the day sun. Surely they can see the birds and will investigate.

“Movement across the landscape is a necessity for animal life,” his father said. “Nomad peoples follow the same necessity. Lines of movement adjust to physical needs for water, food, minerals. We must control this movement now, align it for our purposes.”

“Shut up, old man,” Kynes muttered.

“We must do a thing on Arrakis never before attempted for an entire planet,” his father said. “We must use man as a constructive ecological force—inserting adapted terraform life: a plant here, an animal there, a man in that place—to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape.”

“Shut up!” Kynes croaked.

“It was lines of movement that gave us the first clue to the relationship between worms and spice,” his father said.

A worm, Kynes thought with a surge of hope. A maker’s sure to come when this bubble bursts. But I have no hooks. How can I mount a big maker without hooks?

He could feel frustration sapping what little strength remained to him. Water so near—only a hundred meters or so beneath him; a worm sure to come, but no way to trap it on the surface and use it.

Kynes pitched forward onto the sand, returning to the shallow depression his movements had defined. He felt sand hot against his left cheek, but the sensation was remote.

“The Arrakeen environment built itself into the evolutionary pattern of native life forms,” his father said. “How strange that so few people ever looked up from the spice long enough to wonder at the near-ideal nitrogen-oxygen-CO2 balance being maintained here in the absence of large areas of plant cover. The energy sphere of the planet is there to see and understand—a relentless process, but a process nonetheless. There is a gap in it? Then something occupies that gap. Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained. I knew the little maker was there, deep in the sand, long before I ever saw it.”

“Please stop lecturing me, Father,” Kynes whispered.

A hawk landed on the sand near his outstretched hand. Kynes saw it fold its wings, tip its head to stare at him. He summoned the energy to croak at it. The bird hopped away two steps, but continued to stare at him.

“Men and their works have been a disease on the surface of their planets before now,” his father said. “Nature tends to compensate for diseases, to remove or encapsulate them, to incorporate them into the system in her own way.”

The hawk lowered its head, stretched its wings, refolded them. It transferred its attention to his outstretched hand.

Kynes found that he no longer had the strength to croak at it.

“The historical system of mutual pillage and extortion stops here on Arrakis,” his father said. “You cannot go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after. The physical qualities of a planet are written into its economic and political record. We have the record in front of us and our course is obvious.”

He never could stop lecturing, Kynes thought. Lecturing, lecturing, lecturing—alwayslecturing.

The hawk hopped one step closer to Kynes’ outstretched hand, turned its head first one way and then the other to study the exposed flesh.

“Arrakis is a one-crop planet,” his father said. “One crop. It supports a ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings. It’s the masses and the leavings that occupy our attention. These are far more valuable than has ever been suspected.”

“I’m ignoring you, Father,” Kynes whispered. “Go away.”

And he thought: Surely there must be some of my Fremen near. They cannot help but see the birds over me. They will investigate if only to see if there’s moisture available.

“The masses of Arrakis will know that we work to make the land flow with water,” his father said. “Most of them, of course, will have only a semimystical understanding of how we intend to do this. Many, not understanding the prohibitive mass-ratio problem, may even think we’ll bring water from some other planet rich in it. Let them think anything they wish as long as they believe in us.”

In a minute I’ll get up and tell him what I think of him, Kynes thought. Standing there lecturing me when he should be helping me.

The bird took another hop closer to Kynes’ outstretched hand. Two more hawks drifted down to the sand behind it.

“Religion and law among our masses must be one and the same,” his father said. “An act of disobedience must be a sin and require religious penalties. This will have the dual benefit of bringing both greater obedience and greater bravery. We must depend not so much on the bravery of individuals, you see, as upon the bravery of a whole population.”

Where is my population now when I need it most? Kynes thought. He summoned all his strength, moved his hand a finger’s width toward the nearest hawk. It hopped backward among its companions and all stood poised for flight.

“Our timetable will achieve the stature of a natural phenomenon,” his father said. “A planet’s life is a vast, tightly interwoven fabric. Vegetation and animal changes will be determined at first by the raw physical forces we manipulate. As they establish themselves, though, our changes will become controlling influences in their own right—and we will have to deal with them, too. Keep in mind, though, that we need control only three per cent of the energy surface—only three per cent—to tip the entire structure over into our self-sustaining system.”

Why aren’t you helping me? Kynes wondered. Always the same: when I need you most, you fail me. He wanted to turn his head, to stare in the direction of his father’s voice, stare the old man down. Muscles refused to answer his demand.

Kynes saw the hawk move. It approached his hand, a cautious step at a time while its companions waited in mock indifference. The hawk stopped only a hop away from his hand.

A profound clarity filled Kynes’ mind. He saw quite suddenly a potential for Arrakis that his father had never seen. The possibilities along that different path flooded through him.

“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero,” his father said.

Reading my mind! Kynes thought. Well … let him.

The messages already have been sent to my sietch villages, he thought. Nothing can stop them. If the Duke’s son is alive they’ll find him and protect him as I have commanded. They may discard the woman, his mother, but they’ll save the boy.

The hawk took one hop that brought it within slashing distance of his hand. It tipped its head to examine the supine flesh. Abruptly, it straightened, stretched its head upward and with a single screech, leaped into the air and banked away overhead with its companions behind it.

They’ve come! Kynes thought. My Fremen havefoundme!

Then he heard the sand rumbling.

Every Fremen knew the sound, could distinguish it immediately from the noises of worms or other desert life. Somewhere beneath him, the pre-spice mass had accumulated enough water and organic matter from the little makers, had reached the critical stage of wild growth. A gigantic bubble of carbon dioxide was forming deep in the sand, heaving upward in an enormous “blow” with a dust whirlpool at its center. It would exchange what had been formed deep in the sand for whatever lay on the surface.

The hawks circled overhead screeching their frustration. They knew what was happening. Any desert creature would know.

And I am a desert creature, Kynes thought. You see me, Father? I am a desert creature.

He felt the bubble lift him, felt it break and the dust whirlpool engulf him, dragging him down into cool darkness. For a moment, the sensation of coolness and the moisture were blessed relief. Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

Even the hawks could appreciate these facts.

***

“GET THEIR water, ” the man calling out of the night had said. And Paul fought down his fear, glanced at his mother. His trained eyes saw her readiness for battle, the waiting whipsnap of her muscles.

“It would be regrettable should we have to destroy you out of hand,” the voice above them said.

That’s the one who spoke to us first, Jessica thought. There are at least two of them—one to our right and one on our left.

“Cignoro hrobosa sukares hin mange la pchagavas doi me kamavas na beslas lele pal hrobas!”

It was the man to their right calling out across the basin.

To Paul, the words were gibberish, but out of her Bene Gesserit training, Jessica recognized the speech. It was Chakobsa, one of the ancient hunting languages, and the man above them was saying that perhaps these were the strangers they sought.

In the sudden silence that followed the calling voice, the hoopwheel face of the second moon—faintly ivory blue—rolled over the rocks across the basin, bright and peering.

Scrambling sounds came from the rocks—above and to both sides … dark motions in the moonlight. Many figures flowed through the shadows.

A whole troop! Paul thought with a sudden pang.

A tall man in a mottled burnoose stepped in front of Jessica. His mouth baffle was thrown aside for clear speech, revealing a heavy beard in the sidelight of the moon, but face and eyes were hidden in the overhang of his hood.

“What have we here—jinn or human?” he asked.

When Jessica heard the true-banter in his voice, she allowed herself a faint hope. This was the voice of command, the voice that had first shocked them with its intrusion from the night.

“Human, I warrant,” the man said.

Jessica sensed rather than saw the knife hidden in a fold of the man’s robe. She permitted herself one bitter regret that she and Paul had no shields.

“Do you also speak?” the man asked.

Jessica put all the royal arrogance at her command into her manner and voice. Reply was urgent, but she had not heard enough of this man to be certain she had a register on his culture and weaknesses.

“Who comes on us like criminals out of the night?” she demanded.

The burnoose-hooded head showed tension in a sudden twist, then slow relaxation that revealed much. The man had good control.

Paul shifted away from his mother to separate them as targets and give each of them a clearer arena of action.

The hooded head turned at Paul’s movement, opening a wedge of face to moonlight. Jessica saw a sharp nose, one glinting eye—dark, so dark the eye, without any white in it—a heavy brown and upturned mustache.

“A likely cub,” the man said. “If you’re fugitives from the Harkonnens, it may be you’re welcome among us. What is it, boy?”

The possibilities flashed through Paul’s mind: A trick? A fact? Immediate decision was needed.

“Why should you welcome fugitives?” he demanded.

“A child who thinks and speaks like a man,” the tall man said. “Well, now, to answer your question, my young wali, I am one who does not pay the fai, the water tribute, to the Harkonnens. That is why I might welcome a fugitive.”

He knows who we are, Paul thought. There’s concealment in his voice.

“I am Stilgar, the Fremen,” the tall man said. “Does that speed your tongue, boy?”

It is the same voice, Paul thought. And he remembered the Council with this man seeking the body of a friend slain by the Harkonnens.

“I know you, Stilgar,” Paul said. “I was with my father in Council when you came for the water of your friend. You took away with you my father’s man, Duncan Idaho—an exchange of friends.”

“And Idaho abandoned us to return to his Duke,” Stilgar said.

Jessica heard the shading of disgust in his voice, held herself prepared for attack.

The voice from the rocks above them called: “We waste time here, Stil.”

“This is the Duke’s son,” Stilgar barked. “He’s certainly the one Liet told us to seek.”

“But … a child, Stil.”

“The Duke was a man and this lad used a thumper,” Stilgar said. “That was a brave crossing he made in the path of shai-hulud.”

And Jessica heard him excluding her from his thoughts. Had he already passed sentence?

“We haven’t time for the test,” the voice above them protested.

“Yet he could be the Lisan al-Gaib,” Stilgar said.

He’s looking for an omen! Jessica thought.

“But the woman,” the voice above them said.

Jessica readied herself anew. There had been death in that voice.

“Yes, the woman,” Stilgar said. “And her water.”

“You know the law,” said the voice from the rocks. “Ones who cannot live with the desert—”

“Be quiet,” Stilgar said. “Times change.”

“Did Liet command this?” asked the voice from the rocks.

“You heard the voice of the cielago, Jamis,” Stilgar said. “Why do you press me?”

And Jessica thought: Cielago! the clue of the tongue opened wide avenues of understanding: this was the language of Ilm and Fiqh, and cielago meant bat, a small flying mammal. Voice of the cielago: they had received a distrans message to seek Paul and herself.

“I but remind you of your duties, friend Stilgar,” said the voice above them.

“My duty is the strength of the tribe,” Stilgar said. “That is my only duty. I need no one to remind me of it. This child-man interests me. He is full-fleshed. He has lived on much water. He has lived away from the father sun. He has not the eyes of the ibad. Yet he does not speak or act like a weakling of the pans. Nor did his father. How can this be?”

“We cannot stay out here all night arguing,” said the voice from the rocks. “If a patrol—”

“I will not tell you again, Jamis, to be quiet,” Stilgar said.

The man above them remained silent, but Jessica heard him moving, crossing by a leap over a defile and working his way down to the basin floor on their left.

“The voice of the cielago suggested there’d be value to us in saving you two,” Stilgar said. “I can see possibility in this strong boy-man : he is young and can learn. But what of yourself, woman?” He stared at Jessica.

I have his voice and pattern registered now, Jessica thought. I could control him with a word, but he’s a strong man … worth much more to us unblunted and with full freedom of action. We shall see.

“I am the mother of this boy,” Jessica said. “In part, his strength which you admire is the product of my training.”

“The strength of a woman can be boundless,” Stilgar said. “Certain it is in a Reverend Mother. Are you a Reverend Mother?”

For the moment, Jessica put aside the implications of the question, answered truthfully, “No.”

“Are you trained in the ways of the desert?”

“No, but many consider my training valuable.”

“We make our own judgments on value,” Stilgar said.

“Every man has the right to his own judgments,” she said.

“It is well that you see the reason,” Stilgar said. “We cannot dally here to test you, woman. Do you understand? We’d not want your shade to plague us. I will take the boy-man, your son, and he shall have my countenance, sanctuary in my tribe. But for you, woman—you understand there is nothing personal in this? It is the rule, Istislah, in the general interest. Is that not enough?”

Paul took a half-step forward. “What are you talking about?”

Stilgar flicked a glance across Paul, but kept his attention on Jessica. “Unless you’ve been deep-trained from childhood to live here, you could bring destruction onto an entire tribe. It is the law, and we cannot carry useless….”

Jessica’s motion started as a slumping, deceptive faint to the ground. It was the obvious thing for a weak outworlder to do, and the obvious slows an opponent’s reactions. It takes an instant to interpret a known thing when that thing is exposed as something unknown. She shifted as she saw his right shoulder drop to bring a weapon within the folds of his robe to bear on her new position. A turn, a slash of her arm, a whirling of mingled robes, and she was against the rocks with the man helpless in front of her.

At his mother’s first movement, Paul backed two steps. As she attacked, he dove for shadows. A bearded man rose up in his path, half-crouched, lunging forward with a weapon in one hand. Paul took the man beneath the sternum with a straight-hand jab, sidestepped and chopped the base of his neck, relieving him of the weapon as he fell.

Then Paul was into the shadows, scrambling upward among the rocks, the weapon tucked into his waist sash. He had recognized it in spite of its unfamiliar shape—a projectile weapon, and that said many things about this place, another clue that shields were not used here.

They will concentrate on my mother and that Stilgar fellow. She can handle him. I must get to a safe vantage point where I can threaten them and give her time to escape.

There came a chorus of sharp spring-clicks from the basin. Projectiles whined off the rocks around him. One of them flicked his robe. He squeezed around a corner in the rocks, found himself in a narrow vertical crack, began inching upward—his back against one side, his feet against the other—slowly, as silently as he could.

The roar of Stilgar’s voice echoed up to him: “Get back, you wormheaded lice! She’ll break my neck if you come near!”

A voice out of the basin said: “The boy got away, Stil. What are we—”

“Of course he got away, you sand-brained … Ugh-h-h! Easy, woman!”

“Tell them to stop hunting my son,” Jessica said.

“They’ve stopped, woman. He got away as you intended him to. Great gods below! Why didn’t you say you were a weirding woman and a fighter?”

“Tell your men to fall back,” Jessica said. “Tell them to go out into the basin where I can see them … and you’d better believe that I know how many of them there are.”

And she thought: This is the delicate moment, but if this man is as sharp-minded as I think him, we have a chance.

Paul inched his way upward, found a narrow ledge on which he could rest and look down into the basin. Stilgar’s voice came up to him.

“And if I refuse? How can you … ugh-h-h! Leave be, woman! We mean no harm to you, now. Great gods! If you can do this to the strongest of us, you’re worth ten times your weight of water.”

Now, the test of reason, Jessica thought. She said: “You ask after the Lisan al-Gaib.”

“You could be the folk of the legend,” he said, “but I’ll believe that when it’s been tested. All I know now is that you came here with that stupid Duke who…. Aiee-e-e! Woman! I care not if you kill me! He was honorable and brave, but it was stupid to put himself in the way of the Harkonnen fist!”

Silence.

Presently, Jessica said: “He had no choice, but we’ll not argue it. Now, tell that man of yours behind the bush over there to stop trying to bring his weapon to bear on me, or I’ll rid the universe of you and take him next.”

“You there!” Stilgar roared. “Do as she says!”

“But, Stil—”

“Do as she says, you wormfaced, crawling, sand-brained piece of lizard turd! Do it or I’ll help her dismember you! Can’t you see the worth of this woman?”

The man at the bush straightened from his partial concealment, lowered his weapon.

“He has obeyed,” Stilgar said.

“Now,” Jessica said, “explain clearly to your people what it is you wish of me. I want no young hothead to make a foolish mistake.”

“When we slip into the villages and towns we must mask our origin, blend with the pan and graben folk,” Stilgar said. “We carry no weapons, for the crysknife is sacred. But you, woman, you have the weirding ability of battle. We’d only heard of it and many doubted, but one cannot doubt what he sees with his own eyes. You mastered an armed Fremen. This is a weapon no search could expose.”

There was a stirring in the basin as Stilgar’s words sank home.

“And if I agree to teach you the … weirding way?”

“My countenance for you as well as your son.”

“How can we be sure of the truth in your promise?”

Stilgar’s voice lost some of its subtle undertone of reasoning, took on an edge of bitterness. “Out here, woman, we carry no paper for contracts. We make no evening promises to be broken at dawn. When a man says a thing, that’s the contract. As leader of my people, I’ve put them in bond to my word. Teach us this weirding way and you have sanctuary with us as long as you wish. Your water shall mingle with our water.”

“Can you speak for all Fremen?” Jessica asked.

“In time, that may be. But only my brother, Liet, speaks for all Fremen. Here, I promise only secrecy. My people will not speak of you to any other sietch. The Harkonnens have returned to Dune in force and your Duke is dead. It is said that you two died in a Mother storm. The hunter does not seek dead game.”

There’s a safety in that, Jessica thought. But these people have good communications and a message could be sent.

“I presume there was a reward offered for us,” she said.

Stilgar remained silent, and she could almost see the thoughts turning over in his head, sensing the shifts of his muscles beneath her hands.

Presently, he said: “I will say it once more: I’ve given the tribe’s word-bond. My people know your worth to us now. What could the Harkonnens give us? Our freedom? Hah! no, you are the taqwa, that which buys us more than all the spice in the Harkonnen coffers.”

“Then I shall teach you my way of battle,” Jessica said, and she sensed the unconscious ritual-intensity of her own words.

“Now, will you release me?”

“So be it,” Jessica said. She released her hold on him, stepped aside in full view of the bank in the basin. This is the test-mashed, she thought. But Paul must know about them even if I die for his knowledge.

In the waiting silence, Paul inched forward to get a better view of where his mother stood. As he moved, he heard heavy breathing, suddenly stilled, above him in the vertical crack of the rock, and sensed a faint shadow there outlined against the stars.

Stilgar’s voice came up from the basin: “You, up there! Stop hunting the boy. He’ll come down presently.”

The voice of a young boy or a girl sounded from the darkness above Paul: “But, Stil, he can’t be far from—”

“I said leave him be, Chani! You spawn of a lizard!”

There came a whispered imprecation from above Paul and a low voice: “Call me spawn of a lizard!” But the shadow pulled back out of view.

Paul returned his attention to the basin, picking out the gray-shadowed movement of Stilgar beside his mother.

“Come in, all of you,” Stilgar called. He turned to Jessica. “And now I’ll ask you how we may be certain you’ll fulfill your half of our bargain? You’re the one’s lived with papers and empty contracts and such as—”

“We of the Bene Gesserit don’t break our vows any more than you do,” Jessica said.

There was a protracted silence, then a multiple hissing of voices: “A Bene Gesserit witch!”

Paul brought his captured weapon from his sash, trained it on the dark figure of Stilgar, but the man and his companions remained immobile, staring at Jessica.

“It is the legend,” someone said.

“It was said that the Shadout Mapes gave this report on you,” Stilgar said. “But a thing so important must be tested. If you are the Bene Gesserit of the legend whose son will lead us to paradise….” He shrugged.

Jessica sighed, thinking: So our Missionaria Protectiva even planted religious safety valves all through this hell hole. Ah, well … it’ll help, and that’s what it was meant to do.

She said: “The seeress who brought you the legend, she gave it under the binding of karama and ijaz, the miracle and the inimitability of the prophecy—this I know. Do you wish a sign?”

His nostrils flared in the moonlight. “We cannot tarry for the rites,” he whispered.

Jessica recalled a chart Kynes had shown her while arranging emergency escape routes. How long ago it seemed. There had been a place called “Sietch Tabr” on the chart and beside it the notation: “Stilgar.”

“Perhaps when we get to Sietch Tabr,” she said.

The revelation shook him, and Jessica thought: If only he knew the tricks we use! She must’ve been good, that Bene Gesserit of the Missionaria Protectiva. These Fremen are beautifully prepared to believe in us.

Stilgar shifted uneasily. “We must go now.”

She nodded, letting him know that they left with her permission.

He looked up at the cliff almost directly at the rock ledge where Paul crouched. “You there, lad: you may come down now.” He returned his attention to Jessica, spoke with an apologetic tone: “Your son made an incredible amount of noise climbing. He has much to learn lest he endanger us all, but he’s young.”

“No doubt we have much to teach each other,” Jessica said. “Meanwhile, you’d best see to your companion out there. My noisy son was a bit rough in disarming him.”

Stilgar whirled, his hood flapping. “Where?”

“Beyond those bushes.” She pointed.

Stilgar touched two of his men. “See to it.” He glanced at his companions, identifying them. “Jamis is missing.” He turned to Jessica. “Even your cub knows the weirding way.”

“And you’ll notice that my son hasn’t stirred from up there as you ordered,” Jessica said.

The two men Stilgar had sent returned supporting a third who stumbled and gasped between them. Stilgar gave them a flicking glance, returned his attention to Jessica. “The son will take only your orders, eh? Good. He knows discipline.”

“Paul, you may come down now,” Jessica said.

Paul stood up, emerging into moonlight above his concealing cleft, slipped the Fremen weapon back into his sash. As he turned, another figure arose from the rocks to face him.

In the moonlight and reflection off gray stone, Paul saw a small figure in Fremen robes, a shadowed face peering out at him from the hood, and the muzzle of one of the projectile weapons aimed at him from a fold of robe.

“I am Chani, daughter of Liet.”

The voice was lilting, half filled with laughter.

“I would not have permitted you to harm my companions,” she said.

Paul swallowed. The figure in front of him turned into the moon’s path and he saw an elfin face, black pits of eyes. The familiarity of that face, the features out of numberless visions in his earliest prescience, shocked Paul to stillness. He remembered the angry bravado with which he had once described this face-from-a-dream, telling the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam: “I will meet her.”

And here was the face, but in no meeting he had ever dreamed.

“You were as noisy as shai-hulud in a rage,” she said. “And you took the most difficult way up here. Follow me; I’ll show you an easier way down.”

He scrambled out of the cleft, followed the swirling of her robe across a tumbled landscape. She moved like a gazelle, dancing over the rocks. Paul felt hot blood in his face, was thankful for the darkness.

That girl! She was like a touch of destiny. He felt caught up on a wave, in tune with a motion that lifted all his spirits.

They stood presently amidst the Fremen on the basin floor.

Jessica turned a wry smile on Paul, but spoke to Stilgar: “This will be a good exchange of teachings. I hope you and your people feel no anger at our violence. It seemed … necessary. You were about to … make a mistake.”

“To save one from a mistake is a gift of paradise,” Stilgar said. He touched his lips with his left hand, lifted the weapon from Paul’s waist with the other, tossed it to a companion. “You will have your own maula pistol, lad, when you’ve earned it.”

Paul started to speak, hesitated, remembering his mother’s teaching: “Beginnings are such delicate times. ”

“My son has what weapons he needs,” Jessica said. She stared at Stilgar, forcing him to think of how Paul had acquired the pistol.

Stilgar glanced at the man Paul had subdued—Jamis. The man stood at one side, head lowered, breathing heavily. “You are a difficult woman,” Stilgar said. He held out his left hand to a companion, snapped his fingers. “Kushti bakka te.”

More Chakobsa, Jessica thought.

The companion pressed two squares of gauze into Stilgar’s hand. Stilgar ran them through his fingers, fixed one around Jessica’s neck beneath her hood, fitted the other around Paul’s neck in the same way.

“Now you wear the kerchief of the bakka,” he said. “If we become separated, you will be recognized as belonging to Stilgar’s sietch. We will talk of weapons another time.”

He moved out through his band now, inspecting them, giving Paul’s Fremkit pack to one of his men to carry.

Bakka, Jessica thought, recognizing the religious term: bakka—the weeper. She sensed how the symbolism of the kerchiefs united this band. Why should weeping unite them? she asked herself.

Stilgar came to the young girl who had embarrassed Paul, said: “Chani, take the child-man under your wing. Keep him out of trouble.”

Chani touched Paul’s arm. “Come along, child-man.”

Paul hid the anger in his voice, said: “My name is Paul. It were well you—”

“We’ll give you a name, manling,” Stilgar said, “in the time of the mihna, at the test of aql.”

The test of reason, Jessica translated. The sudden need of Paul’s ascendancy overrode all other consideration, and she barked, “My son’s been tested with the gom jabbar!”

In the stillness that followed, she knew she had struck to the heart of them.

“There’s much we don’t know of each other,” Stilgar said. “But we tarry overlong. Day-sun mustn’t find us in the open.” He crossed to the man Paul had struck down, said, “Jamis, can you travel?”

A grunt answered him. “Surprised me, he did. ’Twas an accident. I can travel.”

“No accident,” Stilgar said. “I’ll hold you responsible with Chani for the lad’s safety, Jamis. These people have my countenance.”

Jessica stared at the man, Jamis. His was the voice that had argued with Stilgar from the rocks. His was the voice with death in it. And Stilgar had seen fit to reinforce his order with this Jamis.

Stilgar flicked a testing glance across the group, motioned two men out. “Larus and Farrukh, you are to hide our tracks. See that we leave no trace. Extra care—we have two with us who’ve not been trained.” He turned, hand upheld and aimed across the basin. “In squad line with flankers—move out. We must be at Cave of the Ridges before dawn.”

Jessica fell into step beside Stilgar, counting heads. There were forty Fremen—she and Paul made it forty-two. And she thought: They travel as a military company—eventhe girl, Chani.

Paul took a place in the line behind Chani. He had put down the black feeling at being caught by the girl. In his mind now was the memory called up by his mother’s barked reminder: “My son’s been tested with the gom jabbar!” He found that his hand tingled with remembered pain.

“Watch where you go,” Chani hissed. “Do not brush against a bush lest you leave a thread to show our passage.”

Paul swallowed, nodded.

Jessica listened to the sounds of the troop, hearing her own footsteps and Paul’s, marveling at the way the Fremen moved. They were forty people crossing the basin with only the sounds natural to the place—ghostly feluccas, their robes flitting through the shadows. Their destination was Sietch Tabr—Stilgar’s sietch.

She turned the word over in her mind: sietch. It was a Chakobsa word, unchanged from the old hunting language out of countless centuries. Sietch: a meeting place in time of danger. The profound implications of the word and the language were just beginning to register with her after the tension of their encounter.

“We move well,” Stilgar said. “With Shai-hulud’s favor, we’ll reach Cave of the Ridges before dawn.”

Jessica nodded, conserving her strength, sensing the terrible fatigue she held at bay by force of will … and, she admitted it: by the force of elation. Her mind focused on the value of this troop, seeing what was revealed here about the Fremen culture.

All of them, she thought, an entire culture trained to military order. What a priceless thing is hereforan outcast Duke!

***

THEY APPROACHED Cave of the Ridges at dawnbreak, moving through a split in the basin wall so narrow they had to turn sideways to negotiate it. Jessica saw Stilgar detach guards in the thin dawnlight, saw them for a moment as they began their scrambling climb up the cliff.

Paul turned his head upward as he walked, seeing the tapestry of this planet cut im cross section where the narrow cleft gaped toward gray-blue sky.

Chani pulled at his robe to hurry him, said: “Quickly. It is already light.”

“The men who climbed above us, where are they going?” Paul whispered.

“The first daywatch,” she said. “Hurry now!”

A guard left outside, Paul thought. Wise. But it would’ve been wiser still for us to approach this place in separate bands. Less chance of losing the whole troop. He paused in the thought, realizing that this was guerrilla thinking, and he remembered his father’s fear that the Atreides might become a guerrilla house.

“Faster,” Chani whispered.

Paul sped his steps, hearing the swish of robes behind. And he thought of the words of the sirat from Yueh’s tiny O.C. Bible.

“Paradise on my right, Hell on my left and the Angel of Death behind. ” He rolled the quotation in his mind.

They rounded a corner where the passage widened. Stilgar stood at one side motioning them into a low hole that opened at right angles.

“Quickly!” he hissed. “We’re like rabbits in a cage if a patrol catches us here.”

Paul bent for the opening, followed Chani into a cave illuminated by thin gray light from somewhere ahead.

“You can stand up,” she said.

He straightened, studied the place: a deep and wide area with domed ceiling that curved away just out of a man’s handreach. The troop spread out through shadows. Paul saw his mother come up on one side, saw her examine their companions. And he noted how she failed to blend with the Fremen even though her garb was identical. The way she moved —such a sense of power and grace.

“Find a place to rest and stay out of the way, child-man,” Chani said. “Here’s food.” She pressed two leaf-wrapped morsels into his hand. They reeked of spice.

Stilgar came up behind Jessica, called an order to a group on the left. “Get the doorseal in place and see to moisture security.” He turned to another Fremen: “Lemil, get glowglobes.” He took Jessica’s arm. “I wish to show you something, weirding woman.” He led her around a curve of rock toward the light source.

Jessica found herself looking out across the wide lip of another opening to the cave, an opening high in a cliff wall—looking out across another basin about ten or twelve kilometers wide. The basin was shielded by high rock walls. Sparse clumps of plant growth were scattered around it.

As she looked at the dawn-gray basin, the sun lifted over the far escarpment illuminating a biscuit-colored landscape of rocks and sand. And she noted how the sun of Arrakis appeared to leap over the horizon.

It’s because we want to hold it back, she thought. Night is safer than day. There came over her then a longing for a rainbow in this place that would never see rain. I must suppress such longings, she thought. They’re a weakness. I no longer can afford weaknesses.

Stilgar gripped her arm, pointed across the basin. “There! There you see proper Druses.”

She looked where he pointed, saw movement: people on the basin floor scattering at the daylight into the shadows of the opposite cliffwall. In spite of the distance, their movements were plain in the clear air. She lifted her binoculars from beneath her robe, focused the oil lenses on the distant people. Kerchiefs fluttered like a flight of multicolored butterflies.

“That is home,” Stilgar said. “We will be there this night.” He stared across the basin, tugging at his mustache. “My people stayed out overlate working. That means there are no patrols about. I’ll signal them later and they’ll prepare for us.”

“Your people show good discipline,” Jessica said. She lowered the binoculars, saw that Stilgar was looking at them.

“They obey the preservation of the tribe,” he said. “It is the way we choose among us for a leader. The leader is the one who is strongest, the one who brings water and security.” He lifted his attention to her face.

She returned his stare, noted the whiteless eyes, the stained eyepits, the dust-rimmed beard and mustache, the line of the catchtube curving down from his nostrils into his stillsuit.

“Have I compromised your leadership by besting you, Stilgar?” she asked.

“You did not call me out,” he said.

“It’s important that a leader keep the respect of his troop,” she said.

“Isn’t a one of those sandlice I cannot handle,” Stilgar said. “When you bested me, you bested us all. Now, they hope to learn from you … the weirding way … and some are curious to see if you intend to call me out.”

She weighed the implications. “By besting you in formal battle?”

He nodded. “I’d advise you against this because they’d not follow you. You’re not of the sand. They saw this in our night’s passage.”

“Practical people,” she said.

“True enough.” He glanced at the basin. “We know our needs. But not many are thinking deep thoughts now this close to home. We’ve been out overlong arranging to deliver our spice quota to the free traders for the cursed Guild … may their faces be forever black.”

Jessica stopped in the act of turning away from him, looked back up into his face. “The Guild? What has the Guild to do with your spice?”

“It’s Liet’s command,” Stilgar said. “We know the reason, but the taste of it sours us. We bribe the Guild with a monstrous payment in spice to keep our skies clear of satellites and such that none may spy what we do to the face of Arrakis.”

She weighed out her words, remembering that Paul had said this must be the reason Arrakeen skies were clear of satellites. “And what is it you do to the face of Arrakis that must not be seen?”

“We change it … slowly but with certainty … to make it fit for human life. Our generation will not see it, nor our children nor our children’s children nor the grandchildren of their children … but it will come.” He stared with veiled eyes out over the basin. “Open water and tall green plants and people walking freely without stillsuits.”

So that’s the dream of this Liet-Kynes, she thought. And she said: “Bribes are dangerous; they have a way of growing larger and larger.”

“They grow,” he said, “but the slow way is the safe way.”

Jessica turned, looked out over the basin, trying to see it the way Stilgar was seeing it in his imagination. She saw only the grayed mustard stain of distant rocks and a sudden hazy motion in the sky above the cliffs.

“Ah-h-h-h,” Stilgar said.

She thought at first it must be a patrol vehicle, then realized it was a mirage—another landscape hovering over the desert-sand and a distant wavering of greenery and in the middle distance a long worm traveling the surface with what looked like Fremen robes fluttering on its back.

The mirage faded.

“It would be better to ride,” Stilgar said, “but we cannot permit a maker into this basin. Thus, we must walk again tonight.”

Maker—theirword for worm, she thought.

She measured the import of his words, the statement that they could not permit a worm into this basin. She knew what she had seen in the mirage—Fremen riding on the back of a giant worm. It took heavy control not to betray her shock at the implications.

“We must be getting back to the others,” Stilgar said. “Else my people may suspect I dally with you. Some already are jealous that my hands tasted your loveliness when we struggled last night in Tuono Basin.”

“That will be enough of that!” Jessica snapped.

“No offense,” Stilgar said, and his voice was mild. “Women among us are not taken against their will … and with you….” He shrugged. “… even that convention isn’t required.”

“You will keep in mind that I was a duke’s lady,” she said, but her voice was calmer.

“As you wish,” he said. “It’s time to seal off this opening, to permit relaxation of stillsuit discipline. My people need to rest in comfort this day. Their families will give them little rest on the morrow.”

Silence fell between them.

Jessica stared out into the sunlight. She had heard what she had heard in Stilgar’s voice—the unspoken offer of more than his countenance. Did he need a wife? She realized she could step into that place with him. It would be one way to end conflict over tribal leadership—female properly aligned with male.

But what of Paul then? Who could tell yet what rules of parenthood prevailed here? And what of the unborn daughter she had carried these few weeks? What of a dead Duke’s daughter? And she permitted herself to face fully the significance of this other child growing within her, to see her own motives in permitting the conception. She knew what it was—she had succumbed to that profound drive shared by all creatures who are faced with death—the drive to seek immortality through progeny. The fertility drive of the species had overpowered them.

Jessica glanced at Stilgar, saw that he was studying her, waiting. A daughter born here to a woman wed to such a one as this man—what would be the fate of such a daughter? she asked herself. Would he try to limit the necessities that a Bene Gesserit must follow?

Stilgar cleared his throat and revealed then that he understood some of the questions in her mind. “What is important for a leader is that which makes him a leader. It is the needs of his people. If you teach me your powers, there may come a day when one of us must challenge the other. I would prefer some alternative.”

“There are several alternatives?” she asked.

“The Sayyadina,” he said. “Our Reverend Mother is old.”

Their Reverend Mother!

Before she could probe this, he said: “I do not necessarily offer myself as mate. This is nothing personal, for you are beautiful and desirable. But should you become one of my women, that might lead some of my young men to believe that I’m too much concerned with pleasures of the flesh and not enough concerned with the tribe’s needs. Even now they listen to us and watch us.”

A man who weighs his decisions, who thinks of consequences, she thought.

“There are those among my young men who have reached the age of wild spirits,” he said. “They must be eased through this period. I must leave no great reasons around for them to challenge me. Because I would have to maim and kill among them. This is not the proper course for a leader if it can be avoided with honor. A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.”

His words, the depth of their awareness, the fact that he spoke as much to her as to those who secretly listened, forced her to reevaluate him.

He has stature, she thought. Where did he learn such inner balance?

“The law that demands our form of choosing a leader is a just law,” Stilgar said. “But it does not follow that justice is always the thing a people needs. What we truly need now is time to grow and prosper, to spread our force over more land.”

What is his ancestry? she wondered. Whence comes such breeding? She said: “Stilgar, I underestimated you.”

“Such was my suspicion,” he said.

“Each of us apparently underestimated the other,” she said.

“I should like an end to this,” he said. “I should like friendship with you … and trust. I should like that respect for each other which grows in the breast without demand for the huddlings of sex.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Do you trust me?”

“I hear your sincerity.”

“Among us,” he said, “the Sayyadina, when they are not the formal leaders, hold a special place of honor. They teach. They maintain the strength of God here.” He touched his breast.

Now I must probe this Reverend Mother mystery, she thought. And she said: “You spoke of your Reverend Mother … and I’ve heard words of legend and prophecy.”

“It is said that a Bene Gesserit and her offspring hold the key to our future,” he said.

“Do you believe I am that one.”

She watched his face, thinking: The young reed dies so easily. Beginnings are times of such great peril.

“We do not know,” he said.

She nodded, thinking: He’s an honorable man. He wants a sign from me, but he’ll not tip fate by telling me the sign.

Jessica turned her head, stared down into the basin at the golden shadows, the purple shadows, the vibrations of dust-mote air across the lip of their cave. Her mind was filled suddenly with feline prudence. She knew the cant of the Missionaria Protectiva, knew how to adapt the techniques of legend and fear and hope to her emergency needs, but she sensed wild changes here … as though someone had been in among these Fremen and capitalized on the Missionaria Protectiva’s imprint.

Stilgar cleared his throat.

She sensed his impatience, knew that the day moved ahead and men waited to seal off this opening. This was a time for boldness on her part, and she realized what she needed: some dar al-hikman, some school of translation that would give her….

“Adab,” she whispered.

Her mind felt as though it had rolled over within her. She recognized the sensation with a quickening of pulse. Nothing in all the Bene Gesserit training carried such a signal of recognition. It could be only the adab, the demanding memory that comes upon you of itself. She gave herself up to it, allowing the words to flow from her.

“Ibn qirtaiba,” she said,“as far as the spot where the dust ends.” She stretched out an arm from her robe, seeing Stilgar’s eyes go wide. She heard a rustling of many robes in the background. “I see a … Fremen with the book of examples,” she intoned. “He reads to al-Lat, the sun whom he defied and subjugated. He reads to the Sadus of the Trial and this is what he reads:

“Mine enemies are like green blades eaten down

That did stand in the path of the tempest.

Hast thou not seen what our Lord did?

He sent the pestilence among them

That did lay schemes against us.

They are like birds scattered by the huntsman.

Their schemes are like pellets of poison

That every mouth rejects.”

A trembling passed through her. She dropped her arm.

Back to her from the inner cave’s shadows came a whispered response of many voices: “Their works have been overturned.”

“The fire of God mount over thy heart,” she said. And she thought: Now, it goes in the proper channel.

“The fire of God set alight,” came the response.

She nodded. “Thine enemies shall fall,” she said.

“Bi-la kaifa,” they answered.

In the sudden hush, Stilgar bowed to her. “Sayyadina,” he said. “If the Shai-hulud grant, then you may yet pass within to become a Reverend Mother.”

Pass within, she thought. An odd way of putting it. But the rest of it fitted into the cant well enough. And she felt a cynical bitterness at what she had done. Our Missionaria Protectiva seldom fails. A place was prepared for us in this wilderness. The prayer of the salat has carved out our hiding place. Now … I must play the part of Auliya, the Friend of God… Sayyadina to rogue peoples who’ve been so heavily imprinted with our Bene Gesserit soothsay they even call their chief priestesses Reverend Mothers.

Paul stood beside Chani in the shadows of the inner cave. He could still taste the morsel she had fed him—bird flesh and grain bound with spice honey and encased in a leaf. In tasting it he had realized he never before had eaten such a concentration of spice essence and there had been a moment of fear. He knew what this essence could do to him—the spice change that pushed his mind into prescient awareness.

“Bi-la kaifa,” Chani whispered.

He looked at her, seeing the awe with which the Fremen appeared to accept his mother’s words. Only the man called Jamis seemed to stand aloof from the ceremony, holding himself apart with arms folded across his breast.

“Duy yakha hin mange,” Chani whispered. “Duy punra hin mange. I have two eyes. I have two feet.”

And she stared at Paul with a look of wonder.

Paul took a deep breath, trying to still the tempest within him. His mother’s words had locked onto the working of the spice essence, and he had felt her voice rise and fall within him like the shadows of an open fire. Through it all, he had sensed the edge of cynicism in her—he knew her so well!—but nothing could stop this thing that had begun with a morsel of food.

Terrible purpose!

He sensed it, the race consciousness that he could not escape. There was the sharpened clarity, the inflow of data, the cold precision of his awareness. He sank to the floor, sitting with his back against rock, giving himself up to it. Awareness flowed into that timeless stratum where he could view time, sensing the available paths, the winds of the future … the winds of the past: the one-eyed vision of the past, the one-eyed vision of the present and the one-eyed vision of the future—all combined in a trinocular vision that permitted him to see time-become-space.

There was danger, he felt, of overrunning himself, and he had to hold onto his awareness of the present, sensing the blurred deflection of experience, the flowing moment, the continual solidification of that-which-is into the perpetual-was.

In grasping the present, he felt for the first time the massive steadiness of time’s movement everywhere complicated by shifting currents, waves, surges, and countersurges, like surf against rocky cliffs. It gave him a new understanding of his prescience, and he saw the source of blind time, the source of error in it, with an immediate sensation of fear.

The prescience, he realized, was an illumination that incorporated the limits of what it revealed—at once a source of accuracy and meaningful error. A kind of Heisenberg indeterminacy intervened: the expenditure of energy that revealed what he saw, changed what he saw.

And what he saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action—the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand—moved a gigantic lever across the known universe. He saw violence with the outcome subject to so many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the pattern.

The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too, was action with its consequences.

The countless consequences—lines fanned out from this cave, and along most of these consequence-lines he saw his own dead body with blood flowing from a gaping knife wound.

***

JESSICA AWAKENED in cave darkness, sensing the stir of Fremen around her, smelling the acrid stillsuit odor. Her inner timesense told her it would soon be night outside, but the cave remained in blackness, shielded from the desert by the plastic hoods that trapped their body moisture within this space.

She realized that she had permitted herself the utterly relaxing sleep of great fatigue, and this suggested something of her own unconscious assessment on personal security within Stilgar’s troop. She turned in the hammock that had been fashioned of her robe, slipped her feet to the rock floor and into her desert boots.

I must remember to fasten the boots slip-fashion to help my stillsuit’s pumping action, she thought. There are so many things to remember.

She could still taste their morning meal—the morsel of bird flesh and grain bound within a leaf with spice honey—and it came to her that the use of time was turned around here: night was the day of activity and day was the time of rest.

Night conceals; night is safest.

She unhooked her robe from its hammock pegs in a rock alcove, fumbled with the fabric in the dark until she found the top, slipped into it.

How to get a message out to the Bene Gesserit? she wondered. They would have to be told of the two strays in Arrakeen sanctuary.

Glowglobes came alight farther into the cave. She saw people moving there, Paul among them already dressed and with his hood thrown back to reveal the aquiline Atreides profile.

He had acted so strangely before they retired, she thought. Withdrawn. He was like one come back from the dead, not yet fully aware of his return, his eyes half shut and glassy with the inward stare. It made her think of his warning about the spice-impregnated diet: addictive.

Are there side effects? she wondered. He said it had something to do with his prescient faculty, but he has been strangely silent about what he sees.

Stilgar came from shadows to her right, crossed to the group beneath the glowglobes. She marked how he fingered his beard and the watchful, cat-stalking look of him.

Abrupt fear shot through Jessica as her senses awakened to the tensions visible in the people gathered around Paul—the stiff movements, the ritual positions.

“They have my countenance!” Stilgar rumbled.

Jessica recognized the man Stilgar confronted—Jamis! She saw then the rage in Jamis—the tight set of his shoulders.

Jamis, the man Paul bested! she thought.

“You know the rule, Stilgar,” Jamis said.

“Who knows it better?” Stilgar asked, and she heard the tone of placation in his voice, the attempt to smooth something over.

“I choose the combat,” Jamis growled.

Jessica sped across the cave, grasped Stilgar’s arm. “What is this?” she asked.

“It is the amtal rule,” Stilgar said. “Jamis is demanding the right to test your part in the legend.”

“She must be championed,” Jamis said. “If her champion wins, that’s the truth in it. But it’s said….” He glanced across the press of people. “… that she’d need no champion from the Fremen—which can mean only that she brings her own champion.”

He’s talking of single combat with Paul! Jessica thought.

She released Stilgar’s arm, took a half-step forward. “I’m always my own champion,” she said. “The meaning’s simple enough for….”

“You’ll not tell us our ways!” Jamis snapped. “Not without more proof than I’ve seen. Stilgar could’ve told you what to say last morning. He could’ve filled your mind full of the coddle and you could’ve bird-talked it to us, hoping to make a false way among us.”

I can take him, Jessica thought, but that might conflict with the way they interpret the legend. And again she wondered at the way the Missionaria Protectiva’s work had been twisted on this planet.

Stilgar looked at Jessica, spoke in a low voice but one designed to carry to the crowd’s fringe. “Jamis is one to hold a grudge, Sayyadina. Your son bested him and—”

“It was an accident!” Jamis roared. “There was witch-force at Tuono Basin and I’ll prove it now!”

“… and I’ve bested him myself,” Stilgar continued. “He seeks by this tahaddi challenge to get back at me as well. There’s too much of violence in Jamis for him ever to make a good leader—too much ghafla, the distraction. He gives his mouth to the rules and his heart to the sarfa, the turning away. No, he could never make a good leader. I’ve preserved him this long because he’s useful in a fight as such, but when he gets this carving anger on him he’s dangerous to his own society.”

“Stilgar-r-r-r!” Jamis rumbled.

And Jessica saw what Stilgar was doing, trying to enrage Jamis, to take the challenge away from Paul.

Stilgar faced Jamis, and again Jessica heard the soothing in the rumbling voice. “Jamis, he’s but a boy. He’s—”

“You named him a man,” Jamis said. “His mother says he’s been through the gom jabbar. He’s full-fleshed and with a surfeit of water. The ones who carried their pack say there’s literjons of water in it. Literjons! And us sipping our catch-pockets the instant they show dew-sparkle.”

Stilgar glanced at Jessica. “Is this true? Is there water in your pack?”

“Yes.”

“Literjons of it?”

“Two literjons.”

“What was intended with this wealth?”

Wealth? she thought. She shook her head, feeling the coldness in his voice.

“Where I was born, water fell from the sky and ran over the land in wide rivers,” she said. “There were oceans of it so broad you could not see the other shore. I’ve not been trained to your water discipline. I never before had to think of it this way.”

A sighing gasp arose from the people around them: “Water fell from the sky … it ran over the land.”

“Did you know there’re those among us who’ve lost from their catch-pockets by accident and will be in sore trouble before we reach Tabr this night?”

“How could I know?” Jessica shook her head. “If they’re in need, give them water from our pack.”

“Is that what you intended with this wealth?”

“I intended it to save life,” she said.

“Then we accept your blessing, Sayyadina.”

“You’ll not buy us off with water,” Jamis growled. “Nor will you anger me against yourself, Stilgar. I see you trying to make me call you out before I’ve proved my words.”

Stilgar faced Jamis. “Are you determined to press this fight against a child, Jamis?” His voice was low, venomous.

“She must be championed.”

“Even though she has my countenance?”

“I invoke the amtal rule,” Jamis said. “It’s my right.”

Stilgar nodded. “Then, if the boy does not carve you down, you’ll answer to my knife afterward. And this time I’ll not hold back the blade as I’ve done before.”

“You cannot do this thing,” Jessica said. “Paul’s just—”

“You must not interfere, Sayyadina,” Stilgar said. “Oh, I know you can take me and, therefore, can take anyone among us, but you cannot best us all united. This must be; it is the amtal rule.”

Jessica fell silent, staring at him in the green light of the glowglobes, seeing the demoniacal stiffness that had taken over his expression. She shifted her attention to Jamis, saw the brooding look to his brows and thought: I should’ve seen that before. He broods. He’s the silent kind, one who works himself up inside. I should’ve been prepared.

“If you harm my son,” she said, “You’ll have me to meet. I call you out now. I’ll carve you into a joint of—”

“Mother.” Paul stepped forward, touched her sleeve. “Perhaps if I explain to Jamis how—”

“Explain!” Jamis sneered.

Paul fell silent, staring at the man. He felt no fear of him. Jamis appeared clumsy in his movements and he had fallen so easily in their night encounter on the sand. But Paul still felt the nexus-boiling of this cave, still remembered the prescient visions of himself dead under a knife. There had been so few avenues of escape for him in that vision….

Stilgar said: “Sayyadina, you must step back now where—”

“Stop calling her Sayyadina!” Jamis said. “That’s yet to be proved. So she knows the prayer! What’s that? Every child among us knows it.”

He has talked enough, Jessica thought. I’ve the key to him. I could immobilize him with a word. She hesitated. But I cannot stop them all.

“You will answer to me then,” Jessica said, and she pitched her voice in a twisting tone with a little whine in it and a catch at the end.

Jamis stared at her, fright visible on his face.

“I’ll teach you agony,” she said in the same tone. “Remember that as you fight. You’ll have agony such as will make the gom jabbar a happy memory by comparison. You will writhe with your entire—”

“She tries a spell on me!” Jamis gasped. He put his clenched right fist beside his ear. “I invoke the silence on her!”

“So be it then,” Stilgar said. He cast a warning glance at Jessica. “If you speak again, Sayyadina, we’ll know it’s your witchcraft and you’ll be forfeit.” He nodded for her to step back.

Jessica felt hands pulling her, helping her back, and she sensed they were not unkindly. She saw Paul being separated from the throng, the elfin-faced Chani whispering in his ear as she nodded toward Jamis.

A ring formed within the troop. More glowglobes were brought and all of them tuned to the yellow band.

Jamis stepped into the ring, slipped out of his robe and tossed it to someone in the crowd. He stood there in a cloudy gray slickness of stillsuit that was patched and marked by tucks and gathers. For a moment, he bent with his mouth to his shoulder, drinking from a catchpocket tube. Presently he straightened, peeled off and detached the suit, handed it carefully into the crowd. He stood waiting, clad in loin-cloth and some tight fabric over his feet, a crysknife in his right hand.

Jessica saw the girl-child Chani helping Paul, saw her press a crysknife handle into his palm, saw him heft it, testing the weight and balance. And it came to Jessica that Paul had been trained in prana and bindu, the nerve and the fiber—that he had been taught fighting in a deadly school, his teachers men like Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck, men who were legends in their own lifetimes. The boy knew the devious ways of the Bene Gesserit and he looked supple and confident.

But he’s only fifteen, she thought. And he has no shield. I must stop this. Somehow, there must be a way to…. She looked up, saw Stilgar watching her.

“You cannot stop it,” he said. “You must not speak.”

She put a hand over her mouth, thinking: I’ve planted fear in Jamis’ mind. It’ll slow him some … perhaps. If I could only pray—trulypray.

Paul stood alone now just into the ring, clad in the fighting trunks he’d worn under his stillsuit. He held a crysknife in his right hand; his feet were bare against the sand-gritted rock. Idaho had warned him time and again: “When in doubt of your surface, bare feet are best. ” And there were Chani’s words of instruction still in the front of his consciousness: “Jamis turns to the right with his knife after a parry. It’s a habit in him we’ve all seen. And he’ll aim for the eyes to catch a blink in which to slash you. And he can fight either hand; look out for a knife shift.”

But strongest in Paul so that he felt it with his entire body was training and the instinctual reaction mechanism that had been hammered into him day after day, hour after hour on the practice floor.

Gurney Halleck’s words were there to remember: “The good knife fighter thinks on point and blade and shearing-guard simultaneously. The point can also cut; the blade can also stab; the shearing-guard can also trap your opponent’s blade. ”

Paul glanced at the crysknife. There was no shearing-guard; only the slim round ring of the handle with its raised lips to protect the hand. And even so, he realized that he did not know the breaking tension of this blade, did not even know if it could be broken.

Jamis began sidling to the right along the edge of the ring opposite Paul.

Paul crouched, realizing then that he had no shield, but was trained to fighting with its subtle field around him, trained to react on defense with utmost speed while his attack would be timed to the controlled slowness necessary for penetrating the enemy’s shield. In spite of constant warning from his trainers not to depend on the shield’s mindless blunting of attack speed, he knew that shield-awareness was part of him.

Jamis called out in ritual challenge: “May thy knife chip and shatter!”

This knife will break then, Paul thought.

He cautioned himself that Jamis also was without shield, but the man wasn’t trained to its use, had no shield-fighter inhibitions.

Paul stared across the ring at Jamis. The man’s body looked like knotted whipcord on a dried skeleton. His crysknife shone milky yellow in the light of the glowglobes.

Fear coursed through Paul. He felt suddenly alone and naked standing in dull yellow light within this ring of people. Prescience had fed his knowledge with countless experiences, hinted at the strongest currents of the future and the strings of decision that guided them, but this was the real-now. This was death hanging on an infinite number of miniscule mischances.

Anything could tip the future here, he realized. Someone coughing in the troop of watchers, a distraction. A variation in a glowglobe’s brilliance, a deceptive shadow.

I’m afraid, Paul told himself.

And he circled warily opposite Jamis, repeating silently to himself the Bene Gesserit litany against fear. “Fear is the mind-killer….” It was a cool bath washing over him. He felt muscles untie themselves, become poised and ready.

“I’ll sheath my knife in your blood,” Jamis snarled. And in the middle of the last word he pounced.

Jessica saw the motion, stifled an outcry.

Where the man struck there was only empty air and Paul stood now behind Jamis with a clear shot at the exposed back.

Now, Paul! Now! Jessica screamed it in her mind.

Paul’s motion was slowly timed, beautifully fluid, but so slow it gave Jamis the margin to twist away, backing and turning to the right.

Paul withdrew, crouching low. “First, you must find my blood,” he said.

Jessica recognized the shield-fighter timing in her son, and it came over her what a two-edged thing that was. The boy’s reactions were those of youth and trained to a peak these people had never seen. But the attack was trained, too, and conditioned by the necessities of penetrating a shield barrier. A shield would repel too fast a blow, admit only the slowly deceptive counter. It needed control and trickery to get through a shield.

Does Paul see it? she asked herself. He must!

Again Jamis attacked, ink-dark eyes glaring, his body a yellow blur under the glowglobes.

And again Paul slipped away to return too slowly on the attack.

And again.

And again.

Each time, Paul’s counterblow came an instant late.

And Jessica saw a thing she hoped Jamis did not see. Paul’s defensive reactions were blindingly fast, but they moved each time at the precisely correct angle they would take if a shield were helping deflect part of Jamis’ blow.

“Is your son playing with that poor fool?” Stilgar asked. He waved her to silence before she could respond. “Sorry; you must remain silent.”

Now the two figures on the rock floor circled each other: Jamis with knife hand held far forward and tipped up slightly; Paul crouched with knife held low.

Again, Jamis pounced, and this time he twisted to the right where Paul had been dodging.

Instead of faking back and out, Paul met the man’s knife hand on the point of his own blade. Then the boy was gone, twisting away to the left and thankful for Chani’s warning.

Jamis backed into the center of the circle, rubbing his knife hand. Blood dripped from the injury for a moment, stopped. His eyes were wide and staring—two blue-black holes—studying Paul with a new wariness in the dull light of the glowglobes.

“Ah, that one hurt,” Stilgar murmured.

Paul crouched at the ready and, as he had been trained to do after first blood, called out: “Do you yield?”

“Hah!” Jamis cried.

An angry murmur arose from the troop.

“Hold!” Stilgar called out. “The lad doesn’t know our rule.” Then, to Paul: “There can be no yielding in the tahaddi-challenge. Death is the test of it.”

Jessica saw Paul swallow hard. And she thought: He’s never killed a man like this … in the hot blood of a knife fight. Can he do it?

Paul circled slowly right, forced by Jamis’ movement. The prescient knowledge of the time-boiling variables in this cave came back to plague him now. His new understanding told him there were too many swiftly compressed decisions in this fight for any clear channel ahead to show itself.

Variable piled on variable—that was why this cave lay as a blurred nexus in his path. It was like a gigantic rock in the flood, creating maelstroms in the current around it.

“Have an end to it, lad,” Stilgar muttered. “Don’t play with him.”

Paul crept farther into the ring, relying on his own edge in speed.

Jamis backed now that the realization swept over him—that this was no soft offworlder in the tahaddi ring, easy prey for a Fremen crysknife.

Jessica saw the shadow of desperation in the man’s face. Now is when he’s most dangerous, she thought. Now he’s desperate and can do anything. He sees that this is not like a child of his own people, but a fighting machine born and trained to it from infancy. Now the fear I planted in him has come to bloom.

And she found in herself a sense of pity for Jamis—an emotion tempered by awareness of the immediate peril to her son.

Jamis could do anything … any unpredictable thing, she told herself. She wondered then if Paul had glimpsed this future, if he were reliving this experience. But she saw the way her son moved, the beads of perspiration on his face and shoulders, the careful wariness visible in the flow of muscles. And for the first time she sensed, without understanding it, the uncertainty factor in Paul’s gift.

Paul pressed the fight now, circling but not attacking. He had seen the fear in his opponent. Memory of Duncan Idaho’s voice flowed through Paul’s awareness: “When your opponent fears you, then’s the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal mistake. You are being trained here to detect these mistakes and use them.”

The crowd in the cavern began to mutter.

They think Paul’s toying with Jamis, Jessica thought. They think Paul’s being needlessly cruel.

But she sensed also the undercurrent of crowd excitement, their enjoyment of the spectacle. And she could see the pressure building up in Jamis. The moment when it became too much for him to contain was as apparent to her as it was to Jamis … or to Paul.

Jamis leaped high, feinting and striking down with his right hand, but the hand was empty. The crysknife had been shifted to his left hand.

Jessica gasped.

But Paul had been warned by Chani: “Jamis fights with either hand. ” And the depth of his training had taken in that trick en passant. “Keep the mind on the knife and not on the hand that holds it, ” Gurney Halleck had told him time and again. “The knife is more dangerous than the hand and the knife can be in either hand. ”

And Paul had seen Jamis’ mistake: bad footwork so that it took the man a heartbeat longer to recover from his leap, which had been intended to confuse Paul and hide the knife shift.

Except for the low yellow light of the glowglobes and the inky eyes of the staring troop, it was similar to a session on the practice floor. Shields didn’t count where the body’s own movement could be used against it. Paul shifted his own knife in a blurred motion, slipped sideways and thrust upward where Jamis’ chest was descending—then away to watch the man crumble.

Jamis fell like a limp rag, face down, gasped once and turned his face toward Paul, then lay still on the rock floor. His dead eyes stared out like beads of dark glass.

“Killing with the point lacks artistry, ” Idaho had once told Paul, “but don’t let that hold your hand when the opening presents itself. ”

The troop rushed forward, filling the ring, pushing Paul aside. They hid Jamis in a frenzy of huddling activity. Presently a group of them hurried back into the depths of the cavern carrying a burden wrapped in a robe.

And there was no body on the rock floor.

Jessica pressed through toward her son. She felt that she swam in a sea of robed and stinking backs, a throng strangely silent.

Now is the terrible moment, she thought. He has killed a man in clear superiority of mind and muscle. He must not grow to enjoy such a victory.

She forced herself through the last of the troop and into a small open space where two bearded Fremen were helping Paul into his stillsuit.

Jessica stared at her son. Paul’s eyes were bright. He breathed heavily, permitting the ministrations to his body rather than helping them.

“Him against Jamis and not a mark on him,” one of the men muttered.

Chani stood at one side, her eyes focused on Paul. Jessica saw the girl’s excitement, the admiration in the elfin face.

It must be done now and swiftly, Jessica thought.

She compressed ultimate scorn into her voice and manner, said: “Well-l-l, now—how does it feel to be a killer?”

Paul stiffened as though he had been struck. He met his mother’s cold glare and his face darkened with a rush of blood. Involuntarily he glanced toward the place on the cavern floor where Jamis had lain.

Stilgar pressed through to Jessica’s side, returning from the cave depths where the body of Jamis had been taken. He spoke to Paul in a bitter, controlled tone: “When the time comes for you to call me out and try for my burda, do not think you will play with me the way you played with Jamis.”

Jessica sensed the way her own words and Stilgar’s sank into Paul, doing their harsh work on the boy. The mistake these people made—it served a purpose now. She searched the faces around them as Paul was doing, seeing what he saw. Admiration, yes, and fear … and in some—loathing. She looked at Stilgar, saw his fatalism, knew how the fight had seemed to him.

Paul looked at his mother. “You know what it was,” he said.

She heard the return to sanity, the remorse in his voice. Jessica swept her glance across the troop, said: “Paul has never before killed a man with a naked blade.”

Stilgar faced her, disbelief in his face.

“I wasn’t playing with him,” Paul said. He pressed in front of his mother, straightening his robe, glanced at the dark place of Jamis’ blood on the cavern floor. “I did not want to kill him.”

Jessica saw belief come slowly to Stilgar, saw the relief in him as he tugged at his beard with a deeply veined hand. She heard muttering awareness spread through the troop.

“That’s why y’ asked him to yield,” Stilgar said. “I see. Our ways are different, but you’ll see the sense in them. I thought we’d admitted a scorpion into our midst.” He hesitated, then: “And I shall not call you lad the more.”

A voice from the troop called out: “Needs a naming, Stil.”

Stilgar nodded, tugging at his beard. “I see strength in you … like the strength beneath a pillar.” Again he paused, then: “You shall be known among us as Usul, the base of the pillar. This is your secret name, your troop name. We of Sietch Tabr may use it, but none other may so presume … Usul.”

Murmuring went through the troop: “Good choice, that … strong … bring us luck.” And Jessica sensed the acceptance, knowing she was included in it with her champion. She was indeed Sayyadina.

“Now, what name of manhood do you choose for us to call you openly?” Stilgar asked.

Paul glanced at his mother, back to Stilgar. Bits and pieces of this moment registered on his prescient memory, but he felt the differences as though they were physical, a pressure forcing him through the narrow door of the present.

“How do you call among you the little mouse, the mouse that jumps?” Paul asked, remembering the pop-hop of motion at Tuono Basin. He illustrated with one hand.

A chuckle sounded through the troop.

“We call that one muad’dib,” Stilgar said.

Jessica gasped. It was the name Paul had told her, saying that the Fremen would accept them and call him thus. She felt a sudden fear of her son and for him.

Paul swallowed. He felt that he played a part already played over countless times in his mind … yet … there were differences. He could see himself perched on a dizzying summit, having experienced much and possessed of a profound store of knowledge, but all around him was abyss.

And again he remembered the vision of fanatic legions following the green and black banner of the Atreides, pillaging and burning across the universe in the name of their prophet Muad’Dib.

That must not happen, he told himself.

“Is that the name you wish, Muad’Dib?” Stilgar asked.

“I am an Atreides,” Paul whispered, and then louder: “It’s not right that I give up entirely the name my father gave me. Could I be known among you as Paul-Muad’Dib?”

“You are Paul-Muad’Dib,” Stilgar said.

And Paul thought: That was in no vision of mine. I did a different thing.

But he felt that the abyss remained all around him.

Again a murmuring response went through the troop as man turned to man: “Wisdom with strength … Couldn’t ask more … It’s the legend for sure … Lisan al-Gaib … Lisan al-Gaib….”

“I will tell you a thing about your new name,” Stilgar said. “The choice pleases us. Muad‘Dib is wise in the ways of the desert. Muad’Dib creates his own water. Muad‘Dib hides from the sun and travels in the cool night. Muad’Dib is fruitful and multiplies over the land. Muad‘Dib we call ’instructor-of-boys.’ That is a powerful base on which to build your life, Paul-Muad’Dib, who is Usul among us. We welcome you.”

Stilgar touched Paul’s forehead with one palm, withdrew his hand, embraced Paul and murmured, “Usul.”

As Stilgar released him, another member of the troop embraced Paul, repeating his new troop name. And Paul was passed from embrace to embrace through the troop, hearing the voices, the shadings of tone: “Usul … Usul … Usul.” Already, he could place some of them by name. And there was Chani who pressed her cheek against his as she held him and said his name.

Presently Paul stood again before Stilgar, who said: “Now, you are of the Ichwan Bedwine, our brother.” His face hardened, and he spoke with command in his voice. “And now, Paul-Muad‘Dib, tighten up that stillsuit.” He glanced at Chani. “Chani! Paul-Muad’Dib’s nose plugs are as poor a fit I’ve ever seen! I thought I ordered you to see after him!”

“I hadn’t the makings, Stil,” she said. “There’s Jamis’, of course, but—”

“Enough of that!”

“Then I’ll share one of mine,” she said. “I can make do with one until—”

“You will not,” Stilgar said.“I know there are spares among us. Where are the spares? Are we a troop together or a band of savages?”

Hands reached out from the troop offering hard, fibrous objects. Stilgar selected four, handed them to Chani. “Fit these to Usul and the Sayyadina.”

A voice lifted from the back of the troop: “What of the water, Stil? What of the literjons in their pack?”

“I know your need, Farok,” Stilgar said. He glanced at Jessica. She nodded.

“Broach one for those that need it,” Stilgar said. “Watermaster … where is a watermaster? Ah, Shimoom, care for the measuring of what is needed. The necessity and no more. This water is the dower property of the Sayyadina and will be repaid in the sietch at field rates less pack fees.”

“What is the repayment at field rates?” Jessica asked.

“Ten for one,” Stilgar said.

“But—”

“It’s a wise rule as you’ll come to see,” Stilgar said.

A rustling of robes marked movement at the back of the troop as men turned to get the water.

Stilgar held up a hand, and there was silence. “As to Jamis,” he said, “I order the full ceremony. Jamis was our companion and brother of the Ichwan Bedwine. There shall be no turning away without the respect due one who proved our fortune by his tahaddi-challenge. I invoke the rite … at sunset when the dark shall cover him.”

Paul, hearing these words, realized that he had plunged once more into the abyss … blind time. There was no past occupying the future in his mind … except … except … he could still sense the green and black Atreides banner waving … somewhere ahead … still see the jihad’s bloody swords and fanatic legions.

It will not be, he told himself. Icannot let it be.

***

IN THE stillness of the cavern, Jessica heard the scrape of sand on rock as people moved, the distant bird calls that Stilgar had said were the signals of his watchmen.

The great plastic hood-seals had been removed from the cave’s opening. She could see the march of evening shadows across the lip of rock in front of her and the open basin beyond. She sensed the daylight leaving them, sensed it in the dry heat as well as the shadows. She knew her trained awareness soon would give her what these Fremen obviously had—the ability to sense even the slightest change in the air’s moisture.

How they had scurried to tighten their stillsuits when the cave was opened! Deep within the cave, someone began chanting:

Jessica translated silently: These are ashes! And these are roots!”

The funeral ceremony for Jamis was beginning.

She looked out at the Arrakeen sunset, at the banked decks of color in the sky. Night was beginning to utter its shadows along the distant rocks and the dunes.

Yet the heat persisted.

Heat forced her thoughts onto water and the observed fact that this whole people could be trained to be thirsty only at given times.

Thirst.

She could remember moonlit waves on Caladan throwing white robes over rocks … and the wind heavy with dampness. Now the breeze that fingered her robes seared the patches of exposed skin at cheeks and forehead. The new nose plugs irritated her, and she found herself overly conscious of the tube that trailed down across her face into the suit, recovering her breath’s moisture.

The suit itself was a sweatbox.

“Your suit will be more comfortable when you’ve adjusted to a lower water content in your body, ” Stillgar had said.

She knew he was right, but the knowledge made this moment no more comfortable. The unconscious preoccupation with water here weighed on her mind. No, she corrected herself: it was preoccupation with moisture.

And that was a more subtle and profound matter.

She heard approaching footsteps, turned to see Paul come out of the cave’s depths trailed by the elfin-faced Chani.

There’s another thing, Jessica thought. Paul must be cautioned about their women. One of these desert women would not do as wife to a Duke. As concubine, yes, but not as wife.

Then she wondered at herself, thinking: Have I been infected with his schemes? And she saw how well she had been conditioned. I can think of the marital needs of royalty without once weighing my own concubinage. Yet … I was more than concubine.

“Mother.”

Paul stopped in front of her. Chani stood at his elbow.

“Mother, do you know what they’re doing back there?”

Jessica looked at the dark patch of his eyes staring out from the hood. “I think so.”

“Chani showed me … because I’m supposed to see it and give my … permission for the weighing of the water.”

Jessica looked at Chani.

“They’re recovering Jamis’ water,” Chani said, and her thin voice came out nasal past the nose plugs. “It’s the rule. The flesh belongs to the person, but his water belongs to the tribe … except in the combat.”

“They say the water’s mine,” Paul said.

Jessica wondered why this should make her suddenly alert and cautious.

“Combat water belongs to the winner,” Chani said. “It’s because you have to fight in the open without stillsuits. The winner has to get his water back that he loses while fighting.”

“I don’t want his water,” Paul muttered. He felt that he was a part of many images moving simultaneously in a fragmenting way that was disconcerting to the inner eye. He could not be certain what he would do, but of one thing he was positive: he did not want the water distilled out of Jamis’ flesh.

“It’s … water,” Chani said.

Jessica marveled at the way she said it. “Water.” So much meaning in a simple sound. A Bene Gesserit axiom came to Jessica’s mind: “Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.” And Jessica thought: Paul and I, we must find the currents and patterns in these strange waters … if we’re to survive.

“You will accept the water,” Jessica said.

She recognized the tone in her voice. She had used that same tone once with Leto, telling her lost Duke that he would accept a large sum offered for his support in a questionable venture—because money maintained power for the Atreides.

On Arrakis, water was money. She saw that clearly.

Paul remained silent, knowing then that he would do as she ordered—not because she ordered it, but because her tone of voice had forced him to re-evaluate. To refuse the water would be to break with accepted Fremen practice.

Presently Paul recalled the words of 467 Kalima in Yueh’s O.C. Bible. He said: “From water does all life begin.”

Jessica stared at him. Where did he learn that quotation? she asked herself. He hasn’t sutdied the mysteries.

“Thus it is spoken,” Chani said. “Giudichar mantene: It is written in the Shah-Nama that water was the first of all things created.”

For no reason she could explain (and this bothered her more than the sensation), Jessica suddenly shuddered. She turned away to hide her confusion and was just in time to see the sunset. A violent calamity of color spilled over the sky as the sun dipped beneath the horizon.

“It is time!”

The voice was Stilgar’s ringing in the cavern. “Jamis’ weapon has been killed. Jamis has been called by Him, by Shai-hulud, who has ordained the phases for the moons that daily wane and—in the end—appear as bent and withered twigs.” Stilgar’s voice lowered. “Thus it is with Jamis.”

Silence fell like a blanket on the cavern.

Jessica saw the gray-shadow movement of Stilgar like a ghost figure within the dark inner reaches. She glanced back at the basin, sensing the coolness.

“The friends of Jamis will approach,” Stilgar said.

Men moved behind Jessica, dropping a curtain across the opening. A single glowglobe was lighted overhead far back in the cave. Its yellow glow picked out an inflowing of human figures. Jessica heard the rustling of the robes.

Chani took a step away as though pulled by the light.

Jessica bent close to Paul’s ear, speaking in the family code: “Follow their lead; do as they do. It will be a simple ceremony to placate the shade of Jamis.”

It will be more than that, Paul thought. And he felt a wrenching sensation within his awareness as though he were trying to grasp some thing in motion and render it motionless.

Chani glided back to Jessica’s side, took her hand. “Come, Sayyadina. We must sit apart.”

Paul watched them move off into the shadows, leaving him alone. He felt abandoned.

The men who had fixed the curtain came up beside him.

“Come, Usul.”

He allowed himself to be guided forward, to be pushed into a circle of people being formed around Stilgar, who stood beneath the glowglobe and beside a bundled, curving, and angular shape gathered beneath a robe on the rock floor.

The troop crouched down at a gesture from Stilgar, their robes hissing with the movement. Paul settled with them, watching Stilgar, noting the way the overhead globe made pits of his eyes and brightened the touch of green fabric at his neck. Paul shifted his attention to the robe-covered mound at Stilgar’s feet, recognized the handle of a baliset protruding from the fabric.

“The spirit leaves the body’s water when the first moon rises,” Stilgar intoned. “Thus it is spoken. When we see the first moon rise this night, whom will it summon?”

“Jamis,” the troop responded.

Stilgar turned full circle on one heel, passing his gaze across the ring of faces. “I was a friend of Jamis,” he said. “When the hawk plane stooped upon us at Hole-in-the-Rock, it was Jamis pulled me to safety.”

He bent over the pile beside him, lifted away the robe. “I take this robe as a friend of Jamis—leader’s right.” He draped the robe over a shoulder, straightening.

Now, Paul saw the contents of the mound exposed: the pale glistening gray of a stillsuit, a battered literjon, a kerchief with a small book in its center, the bladeless handle of a crysknife, an empty sheath, a folded pack, a paracompass, a distrans, a thumper, a pile of fist-sized metallic hooks, an assortment of what looked like small rocks within a fold of cloth, a clump of bundled feathers … and the baliset exposed beside the folded pack.

So Jamis played the baliset, Paul thought. The instrument reminded him of Gurney Halleck and all that was lost. Paul knew with his memory of the future in the past that some chance-lines could produce a meeting with Halleck, but the reunions were few and shadowed. They puzzled him. The uncertainty factor touched him with wonder. Does it mean that something I will do … that I may do, could destroy Gurney … or bring him back to life … or….

Paul swallowed, shook his head.

Again, Stilgar bent over the mound.

“For Jamis’ woman and for the guards,” he said. The small rocks and the book were taken into the folds of his robe.

“Leader’s right,” the troop intoned.

“The marker for Jamis’ coffee service,” Stilgar said, and he lifted a flat disc of green metal. “That it shall be given to Usul in suitable ceremony when we return to the sietch.”

“Leader’s right,” the troop intoned.

Lastly, he took the crysknife handle and stood with it. “For the funeral plain,” he said.

“For the funeral plain,” the troop responded.

At her place in the circle across from Paul, Jessica nodded, recognizing the ancient source of the rite, and she thought: The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture—it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead. She looked across at Paul, wondering: Will he see it? Will he know what to do?’

“We are friends of Jamis,” Stilgar said. “We are not wailing for our dead like a pack of garvarg.”

A gray-bearded man to Paul’s left stood up. “I was a friend of Jamis,” he said. He crossed to the mound, lifted the distrans. “When our water went below minim at the siege at Two Brids, Jamis shared.” The man returned to his place in the circle.

Am I supposed to say I was a friend of Jamis? Paul wondered. Do they expect me to take something from that pile? He saw faces turn toward him, turn away. They do expect it!

Another man across from Paul arose, went to the pack and removed the paracompass. “I was a friend of Jamis,” he said. “When the patrol caught us at Bight-of-the-Cliff and I was wounded, Jamis drew them off so the wounded could be saved.” He returned to his place in the circle.

Again, the faces turned toward Paul, and he saw the expectancy in them, lowered his eyes. An elbow nudged him and a voice hissed: “Would you bring the destruction on us?”

How can I say I was his friend? Paul wondered.

Another figure arose from the circle opposite Paul and, as the hooded face came into the light, he recognized his mother. She removed a kerchief from the mount. “I was a friend of Jamis,” she said. “When the spirit of spirits within him saw the needs of truth, that spirit withdrew and spared my son.” She returned to her place.

And Paul recalled the scorn in his mother’s voice as she had confronted him after the fight. “How does it feel to be a killer?”

Again, he saw the faces turned toward him, felt the anger and fear in the troop. A passage his mother had once filmbooked for him on “The Cult of the Dead” flickered through Paul’s mind. He knew what he had to do.

Slowly, Paul got to his feet.

A sigh passed around the circle.

Paul felt the diminishment of his self as he advanced into the center of the circle. It was as though he lost a fragment of himself and sought it here. He bent over the mound of belongings, lifted out the baliset. A string twanged softly as it struck against something in the pile.

“I was a friend of Jamis,” Paul whispered.

He felt tears burning his eyes, forced more volume into his voice. “Jamis taught me … that … when you kill … you pay for it. I wish I’d known Jamis better.”

Blindly, he groped his way back to his place in the circle, sank to the rock floor.

A voice hissed: “He sheds tears!”

It was taken up around the ring: “Usul gives moisture to the dead!”

He felt fingers touch his damp cheek, heard the awed whispers.

Jessica, hearing the voices, felt the depth of the experience, realized what terrible inhibitions there must be against shedding tears. She focused on the words: “He gives moisture to the dead. ” It was a gift to the shadow world—tears. They would be sacred beyond a doubt.

Nothing on this planet had so forcefully hammered into her the ultimate value of water. Not the water-sellers, not the dried skins of the natives, not stillsuits or the rules of water discipline. Here there was a substance more precious than all others—it was life itself and entwined all around with symbolism and ritual.

Water.

“I touched his cheek,” someone whispered. “I felt the gift.”

At first, the fingers touching his face frightened Paul. He clutched the cold handle of the baliset, feeling the strings bite his palm. Then he saw the faces beyond the groping hands—the eyes wide and wondering.

Presently, the hands withdrew. The funeral ceremony resumed. But now there was a subtle space around Paul, a drawing back as the troop honored him by a respectful isolation.

The ceremony ended with a low chant:

A bulging sack remained at Stilgar’s feet. He crouched, placed his palms against it. Someone came up beside him, crouched at his elbow, and Paul recognized Chani’s face in the hood shadow.

“Jamis carried thirty-three liters and seven and three-thirty-seconds drachms of the tribe’s water,” Chani said. “I bless it now in the presence of a Sayyadina. Ekkeri-akairi, this is the water, fillissin-follasy of Paul-Muad’ Dib! Kivi a-kavi, never the more, nakalas! Nakelas! to be measured and counted, ukair-an! by the heartbeats jan-jan-jan of our friend … Jamis.”

In an abrupt and profound silence, Chani turned, stared at Paul. Presently she said: “Where I am flame be thou the coals. Where I am dew be thou the water.”

“Bi-lal kaifa,” intoned the troop.

“To Paul-Muad’Dib goes this portion,” Chani said. “May he guard it for the tribe, preserving it against careless loss. May he be generous with it in time of need. May he pass it on in his time for the good of the tribe.”

“Bi-lal kaifa,” intoned the troop.

I must accept that water, Paul thought. Slowly, he arose, made his way to Chani’s side. Stilgar stepped back to make room for him, took the baliset gently from his hand.

“Kneel,” Chani said.

Paul knelt.

She guided his hands to the waterbag, held them against the resilient surface. “With this water the tribe entrusts thee,” she said. “Jamis is gone from it. Take it in peace.” She stood, pulling Paul up with her.

Stilgar returned the baliset, extended a small pile of metal rings in one palm. Paul looked at them, seeing the different sizes, the way the light of the glowglobe reflected off them.

Chani took the largest ring, held it on a finger. “Thirty liters,” she said. One by one, she took the others, showing each to Paul, counting them. “Two liters; one liter; seven watercounters of one drachm each; one watercounter of three-thirty-seconds drachms. In all—thirty-three liters and seven and three-thirty-seconds drachms.”

She held them up on her finger for Paul to see.

“Do you accept them?” Stilgar asked.

Paul swallowed, nodded. “Yes.”

“Later,” Chani said, “I will show you how to tie them in a kerchief so they won’t rattle and give you away when you need silence.” She extended her hand.

“Will you … hold them for me?” Paul asked.

Chani turned a startled glance on Stilgar.

He smiled, said, “Paul-Muad’Dib who is Usul does not yet know our ways, Chani. Hold his watercounters without commitment until it’s time to show him the manner of carrying them.”

She nodded, whipped a ribbon of cloth from beneath her robe, linked the rings onto it with an intricate over and under weaving, hesitated, then stuffed them into the sash beneath her robe.

I missed something there, Paul thought. He sensed the feeling of humor around him, something bantering in it, and his mind linked up a prescient memory: watercounters offered to a woman—courtship ritual.

“Watermasters,” Stilgar said.

The troop arose in a hissing of robes. Two men stepped out, lifted the waterbag. Stilgar took down the glowglobe, led the way with it into the depths of the cave.

Paul was pressed in behind Chani, noted the buttery glow of light over rock walls, the way the shadows danced, and he felt the troop’s lift of spirits contained in a hushed air of expectancy.

Jessica, pulled into the end of the troop by eager hands, hemmed around by jostling bodies, suppressed a moment of panic. She had recognized fragments of the ritual, identified the shards of Chakobsa and Bhotani-jib in the words, and she knew the wild violence that could explode out of these seemingly simple moments.

Jan-jan-jan, she thought. Go-go-go.

It was like a child’s game that had lost all inhibition in adult hands.

Stilgar stopped at a yellow rock wall. He pressed an outcropping and the wall swung silently away from him, opening along an irregular crack. He led the way through past a dark honey-comb lattice that directed a cool wash of air across Paul when he passed it.

Paul turned a questioning stare on Chani, tugged her arm. “That air felt damp,” he said.

“Sh-h-h-h,” she whispered.

But a man behind them said: “Plenty of moisture in the trap tonight. Jamis’ way of telling us he’s satisfied.”

Jessica passed through the secret door, heard it close behind. She saw how the Fremen slowed while passing the honeycomb lattice, felt the dampness of the air as she came opposite it.

Windtrap! she thought. They’ve a concealed windtrap somewhere on the surface to funnel air down here into cooler regions and precipitate the moisture from it.

They passed through another rock door with latticework above it, and the door closed behind them. The draft of air at their backs carried a sensation of moisture clearly perceptible to both Jessica and Paul.

At the head of the troop, the glowglobe in Stilgar’s hands dropped below the level of the heads in front of Paul. Presently he felt steps beneath his feet, curving down to the left. Light reflected back up across hooded heads and a winding movement of people spiraling down the steps.

Jessica sensed mounting tension in the people around her, a pressure of silence that rasped her nerves with its urgency.

The steps ended and the troop passed through another low door. The light of the glowglobe was swallowed in a great open space with a high curved ceiling.

Paul felt Chani’s hand on his arm, heard a faint dripping sound in the chill air, felt an utter stillness come over the Fremen in the cathedral presence of water.

I have seen this place in a dream, he thought.

The thought was both reassuring and frustrating. Somewhere ahead of him on this path, the fanatic hordes cut their gory path across the universe in his name. The green and black Atreides banner would become a symbol of terror. Wild legions would charge into battle screaming their war cry: “Muad’Dib!”

It must not be, he thought. I cannot let it happen.

But he could feel the demanding race consciousness within him, his own terrible purpose, and he knew that no small thing could deflect the juggernaut. It was gathering weight and momentum. If he died this instant, the thing would go on through his mother and his unborn sister. Nothing less than the deaths of all the troop gathered here and now—himself and his mother included—could stop the thing.

Paul stared around him, saw the troop spread out in a line. They pressed him forward against a low barrier carved from native rock. Beyond the barrier in the glow of Stilgar’s globe, Paul saw an unruffled dark surface of water. It stretched away into shadows—deep and black—the far wall only faintly visible, perhaps a hundred meters away.

Jessica felt the dry pulling of skin on her cheeks and forehead relaxing in the presence of moisture. The water pool was deep; she could sense its deepness, and resisted a desire to dip her hands into it.

A splashing sounded on her left. She looked down the shadowy line of Fremen, saw Stilgar with Paul standing beside him and the watermasters emptying their load into the pool through a flowmeter. The meter was a round gray eye above the pool’s rim. She saw its glowing pointer move as the water flowed through it, saw the pointer stop at thirty-three liters, seven and three-thirty-seconds drachms.

Superb accuracy in water measurement, Jessica thought. And she noted that the walls of the meter trough held no trace of moisture after the water’s passage. The water flowed off those walls without binding tension. She saw a profound clue to Fremen technology in the simple fact: they were perfectionists.

Jessica worked her way down the barrier to Stilgar’s side. Way was made for her with casual courtesy. She noted the withdrawn look in Paul’s eyes, but the mystery of this great pool of water dominated her thoughts.

Stilgar looked at her. “There were those among us in need of water,” he said, “yet they would come here and not touch this water. Do you know that?”

“I believe it,” she said.

He looked at the pool. “We have more than thirty-eight million decaliters here,” he said. “Walled off from the little makers, hidden and preserved.”

“A treasure trove,” she said.

Stilgar lifted the globe to look into her eyes. “It is greater than treasure. We have thousands of such caches. Only a few of us know them all.” He cocked his head to one side. The globe cast a yellow-shadowed glow across face and beard. “Hear that?”

They listened.

The dripping of water precipitated from the windtrap filled the room with its presence. Jessica saw that the entire troop was caught up in a rapture of listening. Only Paul seemed to stand remote from it.

To Paul, the sound was like moments ticking away. He could feel time flowing through him, the instants never to be recaptured. He sensed a need for decision, but felt powerless to move.

“It has been calculated with precision,” Stilgar whispered. “We know to within a million decaliters how much we need. When we have it, we shall change the face of Arrakis.”

A hushed whisper of response lifted from the troop: “Bi-lal kaifa.”

“We will trap the dunes beneath grass plantings,” Stilgar said, his voice growing stronger. “We will tie the water into the soil with trees and undergrowth.”

“Bi-lal kaifa,” intoned the troop.

“Each year the polar ice retreats,” Stilgar said.

“Bi-lal kaifa,” they chanted.

“We shall make a homeworld of Arrakis—with melting lenses at the poles, with lakes in the temperate zones, and only the deep desert for the maker and his spice.”

“Bi-lal kaifa.”

“And no man ever again shall want for water. It shall be his for dipping from well or pond or lake or canal. It shall run down through the qanats to feed our plants. It shall be there for any man to take. It shall be his for holding out his hand.”

“Bi-lal kaifa.”

Jessica felt the religious ritual in the words, noted her own instinctively awed response. They’re in league with the future, she thought. They have their mountain to climb. This is the scientist’s dream … and these simple people, these peasants, are filled with it.

Her thoughts turned to Liet-Kynes, the Emperor’s planetary ecologist, the man who had gone native—and she wondered at him. This was a dream to capture men’s souls, and she could sense the hand of the ecologist in it. This was a dream for which men would die willingly. It was another of the essential ingredients that she felt her son needed: people with a goal. Such people would be easy to imbue with fervor and fanaticism. They could be wielded like a sword to win back Paul’s place for him.

“We leave now,” Stilgar said, “and wait for the first moon’s rising. When Jamis is safely on his way, we will go home.”

Whispering their reluctance, the troop fell in behind him, turned back along the water barrier and up the stairs.

And Paul, walking behind Chani, felt that a vital moment had passed him, that he had missed an essential decision and was now caught up in his own myth. He knew he had seen this place before, experienced it in a fragment of prescient dream on faraway Caladan, but details of the place were being filled in now that he had not seen. He felt a new sense of wonder at the limits of his gift. It was as though he rode within the wave of time, sometimes in its trough, sometimes on a crest—and all around him the other waves lifted and fell, revealing and then hiding what they bore on their surface.

Through it all, the wild jihad still loomed ahead of him, the violence and the slaughter. It was like a promontory above the surf.

The troop filed through the last door into the main cavern. The door was sealed. Lights were extinguished, hoods removed from the cavern openings, revealing the night and the stars that had come over the desert.

Jessica moved to the dry lip of the cavern’s edge, looked up at the stars. They were sharp and near. She felt the stirring of the troop around her, heard the sound of a baliset being tuned somewhere behind her, and Paul’s voice humming the pitch. There was a melancholy in his tone that she did not like.

Chani’s voice intruded from the deep cave darkness: “Tell me about the waters of your birthworld, Paul Muad’Dib.”

And Paul: “Another time, Chani. I promise.”

Such sadness.

“It’s a good baliset,” Chani said.

“Very good,” Paul said. “Do you think Jamis’ll mind my using it?”

He speaks of the dead in the present tense, Jessica thought. The implications disturbed her.

A man’s voice intruded: “He liked music betimes, Jamis did.”

“Then sing me one of your songs,” Chani pleaded.

Such feminine allure in that girl-child’s voice, Jessica thought. I must caution Paul about their women … and soon.

“This was a song of a friend of mine,” Paul said. “I expect he’s dead now, Gurney is. He called it his evensong.”

The troop grew still, listening as Paul’s voice lifted in a sweet boy tenor with the baliset tinkling and strumming beneath it:

Jessica felt the verbal music in her breast—pagan and charged with sounds that made her suddenly and intensely aware of herself, feeling her own body and its needs. She listened with a tense stillness.

And Jessica heard the after-stillness that hummed in the air with the last note. Why does my son sing a love song to that girl-child? she asked herself. She felt an abrupt fear. She could sense life flowing around her and she had no grasp on its reins. Why did he choose that song? she wondered. The instincts are true sometimes. Why did he do this?

Paul sat silently in the darkness, a single stark thought dominating his awareness: My mother is my enemy. She does not know it, but she is. She is bringing the jihad. She bore me; she trained me. She is my enemy.

***

ON HIS seventeenth birthday, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen killed his one hundredth slave-gladiator in the family games. Visiting observers from the Imperial Court—a Count and Lady Fenring—were on the Harkonnen homeworld of Giedi Prime for the event, invited to sit that afternoon with the immediate family in the golden box above the triangular arena.

In honor of the na-Baron’s nativity and to remind all Harkonnens and subjects that Feyd-Rautha was heir-designate, it was holiday on Giedi Prime. The old Baron had decreed a meridian-to-meridian rest from labors, and effort had been spent in the family city of Harko to create the illusion of gaiety: banners flew from buildings, new paint had been splashed on the walls along Court Way.

But off the main way, Count Fenring and his lady noted the rubbish heaps, the scabrous brown walls reflected in the dark puddles of the streets, and the furtive scurrying of the people.

In the Baron’s blue-walled keep, there was fearful perfection, but the Count and his lady saw the price being paid—guards everywhere and weapons with that special sheen that told a trained eye they were in regular use. There were checkpoints for routine passage from area to area even within the keep. The servants revealed their military training in the way they walked, in the set of their shoulders … in the way their eyes watched and watched and watched.

“The pressure’s on,” the Count hummed to his lady in their secret language. “The Baron is just beginning to see the price he really paid to rid himself of the Duke Leto.”

“Sometime I must recount for you the legend of the phoenix,” she said.

They were in the reception hall of the keep waiting to go to the family games. It was not a large hall—perhaps forty meters long and half that in width—but false pillars along the sides had been shaped with an abrupt taper, and the ceiling had a subtle arch, all giving the illusion of much greater space.

“Ah-h-h, here comes the Baron,” the Count said.

The Baron moved down the length of the hall with that peculiar waddling-glide imparted by the necessities of guiding suspensor-hung weight. His jowls bobbed up and down; the suspensors jiggled and shifted beneath his orange robe. Rings glittered on his hands and opafires shone where they had been woven into the robe.

At the Baron’s elbow walked Feyd-Rautha. His dark hair was dressed in close ringlets that seemed incongruously gay above sullen eyes. He wore a tight-fitting black tunic and snug trousers with a suggestion of bell at the bottom. Soft-soled slippers covered his small feet.

Lady Fenring, noting the young man’s poise and the sure flow of muscles beneath the tunic thought: Here’s one who won’t let himself go to fat.

The Baron stopped in front of them, took Feyd-Rautha’s arm in a possessive grip, said, “My nephew, the na-Baron, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen.” And, turning his baby-fat face toward Feyd-Rautha, he said, “The Count and Lady Fenring of whom I’ve spoken.”

Feyd-Rautha dipped his head with the required courtesy. He stared at the Lady Fenring. She was golden-haired and willowy, her perfection of figure clothed in a flowing gown of ecru—simple fitness of form without ornament. Gray-green eyes stared back at him. She had that Bene Gesserit serene repose about her that the young man found subtly disturbing.

“Um-m-m-m-ah-hm-m-m-m,” said the Count. He studied Feyd-Rautha. “The, hm-m-m-m, precise young man, ah, my … hm-m-m-m … dear?” The Count glanced at the Baron. “My dear Baron, you say you’ve spoken of us to this precise young man? What did you say?”

“I told my nephew of the great esteem our Emperor holds for you, Count Fenring,” the Baron said, And he thought: Mark him well, Feyd! A killer with the manners of a rabbit—this is the most dangerous kind.

“Of course!” said the Count, and he smiled at his lady.

Feyd-Rautha found the man’s actions and words almost insulting. They stopped just short of something overt that would require notice. The young man focused his attention on the Count: a small man, weak-looking. The face was weaselish with overlarge dark eyes. There was gray at the temples. And his movements—he moved a hand or turned his head one way, then he spoke another way. It was difficult to follow.

“Um-m-m-m-m-ah-h-h-hm-m-m, you come upon such, mm-m-m, preciseness so rarely,” the Count said, addressing the Baron’s shoulder. “I … ah, congratulate you on the hm-m-m perfection of your ah-h-h heir. In the light of the hm-m-m elder, one might say.”

“You are too kind,” the Baron said. He bowed, but Feyd-Rautha noted that his uncle’s eyes did not agree with the courtesy.

“When you’re mm-m-m ironic, that ah-h-h suggests you’re hm-m-m-m thinking deep thoughts,” the Count said.

There he goes again, Feyd-Rautha thought. It sounds like he’s being insulting, but there’s nothing you can call out for satisfaction.

Listening to the man gave Feyd-Rautha the feeling his head was being pushed through mush … um-m-m-ah-h-h-hm-m-m-m! Feyd-Rautha turned his attention back to the Lady Fenring.

“We’re ah-h-h taking up too much of this young man’s time,” she said. “I understand he’s to appear in the arena today.”

By the houris of the Imperial hareem, she’s a lovely one! Feyd-Rautha thought. He said: “I shall make a kill for you this day, my Lady. I shall make the dedication in the arena, with your permission.”

She returned his stare serenely, but her voice carried whiplash as she said: “You do not have my permission.”

“Feyd!” the Baron said. And he thought: That imp! Does he want this deadly Count to call him out?

But the Count only smiled and said: “Hm-m-m-m-um-m-m.”

“You really must be getting ready for the arena, Feyd,” the Baron said. “You must be rested and not take any foolish risks.”

Feyd-Rautha bowed, his face dark with resentment. “I’m sure everything will be as you wish, Uncle.” He nodded to Count Fenring. “Sir.” To the lady: “My Lady.” And he turned, strode out of the hall, barely glancing at the knot of Families Minor near the double doors.

“He’s so young,” the Baron sighed.

“Um-m-m-m-ah indeed hmmm,” the Count said.

And the Lady Fenring thought: Can that be the young man the Reverend Mother meant? Is that a bloodline we must preserve?

“We’ve more than an hour before going to the arena,” the Baron said. “Perhaps we could have our little talk now, Count Fenring.” He tipped his gross head to the right. “There’s a considerable amount of progress to be discussed.”

And the Baron thought: Let us see now how the Emperor’s errand boy gets across whatever message he carries without ever being so crass as to speak it right out.

The Count spoke to his lady: “Um-m-m-m-ah-h-h-hm-m-m, you mm-m will ah-h-h excuse us, my dear?”

“Each day, some time each hour, brings change,” she said. “Mm-m-m-m.” And she smiled sweetly at the Baron before turning away. Her long skirts swished and she walked with a straight-backed regal stride toward the double doors at the end of the hall.

The Baron noted how all conversation among the Houses Minor there stopped at her approach, how the eyes followed her. Bene Gesserit! the Baron thought. The universe would be better rid of them all!

“There’s a cone of silence between two of the pillars over here on our left,” the Baron said. “We can talk there without fear of being overheard.” He led the way with his waddling gait into the sound-deadening field, feeling the noises of the keep become dull and distant.

The Count moved up beside the Baron, and they turned, facing the wall so their lips could not be read.

“We’re not satisfied with the way you ordered the Sardaukar off Arrakis,” the Count said.

Straight talk! the Baron thought.

“The Sardaukar could not stay longer without risking that others would find out how the Emperor helped me,” the Baron said.

“But your nephew Rabban does not appear to be pressing strongly enough toward a solution of the Fremen problem.”

“What does the Emperor wish?” the Baron asked. “There cannot be more than a handful of Fremen left on Arrakis. The southern desert is uninhabitable. The northern desert is swept regularly by our patrols.”

“Who says the southern desert is uninhabitable?”

“Your own planetologist said it, my dear Count.”

“But Doctor Kynes is dead.”

“Ah, yes … unfortunate, that.”

“We’ve word from an overflight across the southern reaches,” the Count said. “There’s evidence of plant life.”

“Has the Guild then agreed to a watch from space?”

“You know better than that, Baron. The Emperor cannot legally post a watch on Arrakis.”

“And I cannot afford it,” the Baron said. “Who made this overflight?”

“A … smuggler.”

“Someone has lied to you, Count,” the Baron said. “Smugglers cannot navigate the southern reaches any better than can Rabban’s men. Storms, sand-static, and all that, you know. Navigation markers are knocked out faster than they can be installed.”

“We’ll discuss various types of static another time,” the Count said.

Ah-h-h-h, the Baron thought. “Have you found some mistake in my accounting then?” he demanded.

“When you imagine mistakes there can be no self-defense,” the Count said.

He’s deliberately trying to arouse my anger, the Baron thought. He took two deep breaths to calm himself. He could smell his own sweat, and the harness of the suspensors beneath his robe felt suddenly itchy and galling.

“The Emperor cannot be unhappy about the death of the concubine and the boy,” the Baron said. “They fled into the desert. There was a storm.”

“Yes, there were so many convenient accidents,” the Count agreed.

“I do not like your tone, Count,” the Baron said.

“Anger is one thing, violence another,” the Count said. “Let me caution you: Should an unfortunate accident occur to me here the Great Houses all would learn what you did on Arrakis. They’ve long suspected how you do business.”

“The only recent business I can recall,” the Baron said, “was transportation of several legions of Sardaukar to Arrakis.”

“You think you could hold that over the Emperor’s head?”

“I wouldn’t think of it!”

The Count smiled. “Sardaukar commanders could be found who’d confess they acted without orders because they wanted a battle with your Fremen scum.”

“Many might doubt such a confession,” the Baron said, but the threat staggered him. Are Sardaukar truly that disciplined? he wondered.

“The Emperor does wish to audit your books,” the Count said.

“Any time.”

“You … ah … have no objections?”

“None. My CHOAM Company directorship will bear the closest scrutiny.” And he thought: Let him bring a false accusation against me and have it exposed. I shall stand there, promethean, saying: “Behold me, I am wronged. ” Then let him bring any other accusation against me, even a true one. The Great Houses will not believe a second attack from an accuser once proved wrong.

“No doubt your books will bear the closest scrutiny,” the Count muttered.

“Why is the Emperor so interested in exterminating the Fremen?” the Baron asked.

“You wish the subject to be changed, eh?” The Count shrugged. “It is the Sardaukar who wish it, not the Emperor. They needed practice in killing … and they hate to see a task left undone.”

Does he think to frighten me by reminding me that he is supported by bloodthirsty killers? the Baron wondered.

“A certain amount of killing has always been an arm of business,” the Baron said, “but a line has to be drawn somewhere. Someone must be left to work the spice.”

The Count emitted a short, barking laugh. “You think you can harness the Fremen?”

“There never were enough of them for that,” the Baron said. “But the killing has made the rest of my population uneasy. It’s reaching the point where I’m considering another solution to the Arrakeen problem, my dear Fenring. And I must confess the Emperor deserves credit for the inspiration.”

“Ah-h-h?”

“You see, Count, I have the Emperor’s prison planet, Salusa Secundus, to inspire me.”

The Count stared at him with glittering intensity. “What possible connection is there between Arrakis and Salusa Secundus?”

The Baron felt the alertness in Fenring’s eyes, said: “No connection yet.”

“Yet?”

“You must admit it’d be a way to develop a substantial work force on Arrakis—use the place as a prison planet.”

“You anticipate an increase in prisoners?”

“There has been unrest,” the Baron admitted. “I’ve had to squeeze rather severely, Fenring. After all, you know the price I paid that damnable Guild to transport our mutual force to Arrakis. That money has to come from somewhere.

“I suggest you not use Arrakis as a prison planet without the Emperor’s permission, Baron.”

“Of course not,” the Baron said, and he wondered at the sudden chill in Fenring’s voice.

“Another matter,” the Count said. “We learn that Duke Leto’s Mentat, Thufir Hawat, is not dead but in your employ.”

“I could not bring myself to waste him,” the Baron said.

“You lied to our Sardaukar commander when you said Hawat was dead.”

“Only a white lie, my dear Count. I hadn’t the stomach for a long argument with the man.”

“Was Hawat the real traitor?”

“Oh, goodness, no! It was the false doctor.” The Baron wiped at perspiration on his neck. “You must understand, Fenring, I was without a Mentat. You know that. I’ve never been without a Mentat. It was most unsettling.”

“How could you get Hawat to shift allegiance?”

“His Duke was dead.” The Baron forced a smile. “There’s nothing to fear from Hawat, my dear Count. The Mentat’s flesh has been impregnated with a latent poison. We administer an antidote in his meals. Without the antidote, the poison is triggered—he’d die in a few days.”

“Withdraw the antidote,” the Count said.

“But he’s useful!”

“And he knows too many things no living man should know.”

“You said the Emperor doesn’t fear exposure.”

“Don’t play games with me, Baron!”

“When I see such an order above the Imperial seal I’ll obey it,” the Baron said. “But I’ll not submit to your whim.”

“You think it whim?”

“What else can it be? The Emperor has obligations to me, too, Fenring. I rid him of the troublesome Duke.”

“With the help of a few Sardaukar.”

“Where else would the Emperor have found a House to provide the disguising uniforms to hide his hand in this matter?”

“He has asked himself the same question, Baron, but with a slightly different emphasis.”

The Baron studied Fenring, noting the stiffness of jaw muscles, the careful control. “Ah-h-h, now,” the Baron said. “I hope the Emperor doesn’t believe he can move against me in total secrecy.”

“He hopes it won’t become necessary.”

“The Emperor cannot believe I threaten him!” The Baron permitted anger and grief to edge his voice, thinking: Let him wrong me in that! I could place myself on the throne while still beating my breast over how I’d been wronged.

The Count’s voice went dry and remote as he said: “The Emperor believes what his senses tell him.”

“Dare the Emperor charge me with treason before a full Landstraad Council?” And the Baron held his breath with the hope of it.

“The Emperor need dare nothing.”

The Baron whirled away in his suspensors to hide his expression. It could happen in my lifetime! he thought. Emperor! Let him wrong me! Then—the bribes and coercion, the rallying of the Great Houses: they’d flock to my banner like peasants running for shelter. The thing they fear above all else is the Emperor’s Sardaukar loosed upon them one House at a time.

“It’s the Emperor’s sincere hope he’ll never have to charge you with treason,” the Count said.

The Baron found it difficult to keep irony out of his voice and permit only the expression of hurt, but he managed. “I’ve been a most loyal subject. These words hurt me beyond my capacity to express.”

“Um-m-m-m-ah-hm-m-m,” said the Count.

The Baron kept his back to the Count, nodding. Presently he said, “It’s time to go to the arena.”

“Indeed,” said the Count.

They moved out of the cone of silence and, side by side, walked toward the clumps of Houses Minor at the end of the hall. A bell began a slow tolling somewhere in the keep—twenty-minute warning for the arena gathering.

“The Houses Minor wait for you to lead them,” the Count said, nodding toward the people they approached.

Double meaning … double meaning, the Baron thought.

He looked up at the new talismans flanking the exit to his hall—the mounted bull’s head and the oil painting of the Old Duke Atreides, the late Duke Leto’s father. They filled the Baron with an odd sense of foreboding, and he wondered what thoughts these talismans had inspired in the Duke Leto as they hung in the halls of Caladan and then on Arrakis—the bravura father and the head of the bull that had killed him.

“Mankind has ah only one mm-m-m science,” the Count said as they picked up their parade of followers and emerged from the hall into the waiting room—a narrow space with high windows and floor of patterned white and purple tile.

“And what science is that?” the Baron asked.

“It’s the um-m-m-ah-h science of ah-h-h discontent,” the Count said.

The Houses Minor behind them, sheep-faced and responsive, laughed with just the right tone of appreciation, but the sound carried a note of discord as it collided with the sudden blast of motors that came to them when pages threw open the outer doors, revealing the line of ground cars, their guidon pennants whipping in a breeze.

The Baron raised his voice to surmount the sudden noise, said, “I hope you’ll not be discontented with the performance of my nephew today, Count Fenring.”

“I ah-h-h am filled um-m-m only with a hm-m-m sense of anticipation, yes,” the Count said. “Always in the ah-h-h proces verbal, one um-m-m ah-h-h must consider the ah-h-h office of origin.”

The Baron did his sudden stiffening of surprise by stumbling on the first step down from the exit. Proces verbal! That was a report of a crime against the Imperium!

But the Count chuckled to make it seem a joke, and patted the Baron’s arm.

All the way to the arena, though, the Baron sat back among the armored cushions of his car, casting covert glances at the Count beside him, wondering why the Emperor’s errand boy had thought it necessary to make that particular kind of joke in front of the Houses Minor. It was obvious that Fenring seldom did anything he felt to be unnecessary, or used two words where one would do, or held himself to a single meaning in a single phrase.

They were seated in the golden box above the triangular arena—horns blaring, the tiers above and around them jammed with a hubbub of people and waving pennants—when the answer came to the Baron.

“My dear Baron,” the Count said, leaning close to his ear, “you know, don’t you, that the Emperor has not given official sanction to your choice of heir?”

The Baron felt himself to be within a sudden personal cone of silence produced by his own shock. He stared at Fenring, barely seeing the Count’s lady come through the guards beyond to join the party in the golden box.

“That’s really why I’m here today,” the Count said. “The Emperor wishes me to report on whether you’ve chosen a worthy successor. There’s nothing like the arena to expose the true person from beneath the mask, eh?”

“The Emperor promised me free choice of heir!” the Baron grated.

“We shall see,” Fenring said, and turned away to greet his lady. She sat down, smiling at the Baron, then giving her attention to the sand floor beneath them where Feyd-Rautha was emerging in giles and tights—the black glove and the long knife in his right hand, the white glove and the short knife in his left hand.

“White for poison, black for purity,” the Lady Fenring said. “A curious custom, isn’t it, my love?”

“Um-m-m-m,” the Count said.

The greeting cheer lifted from the family galleries, and Feyd-Rautha paused to accept it, looking up and scanning the faces—seeing his cousines and cousins, the demibrothers, the concubines and out-freyn relations. They were so many pink trumpet mouths yammering amidst a flutter of colorful clothing and banners.

It came to Feyd-Rautha then that the packed ranks of faces would look just as avidly at his blood as at that of the slave-gladiator. There was not a doubt of the outcome in this fight, of course. Here was only the form of danger without its substance—yet….

Feyd-Rautha held up his knives to the sun, saluted the three corners of the arena in the ancient manner. The short knife in white-gloved hand (white, the sign of poison) went first into its sheath. Then the long blade in the black-gloved hand—the pure blade that now was unpure, his secret weapon to turn this day into a purely personal victory: poison on the black blade.

The adjustment of his body shield took only a moment, and he paused to sense the skin-tightening at his forehead assuring him he was properly guarded.

This moment carried its own suspense, and Feyd-Rautha dragged it out with the sure hand of a showman, nodding to his handlers and distractors, checking their equipment with a measuring stare—gyves in place with their prickles sharp and glistening, the barbs and hooks waving with their blue streamers.

Feyd-Rautha signaled the musicians.

The slow march began, sonorous with its ancient pomp, and Feyd-Rautha led his troupe across the arena for obeisance at the foot of his uncle’s box. He caught the ceremonial key as it was thrown.

The music stopped.

Into the abrupt silence, he stepped back two paces, raised the key and shouted. “I dedicate this truth to….” And he paused, knowing his uncle would think: The young fool’s going to dedicate to Lady Fenring after all and cause a ruckus!

“… to my uncle and patron, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen!” Feyd-Rautha shouted.

And he was delighted to see his uncle sigh.

The music resumed at the quick-march, and Feyd-Rautha led his men scampering back across the arena to the prudence door that admitted only those wearing the proper identification band. Feyd-Rautha prided himself that he never used the pru-door and seldom needed distractors. But it was good to know they were available this day—special plans sometimes involved special dangers.

Again, silence settled over the arena.

Feyd-Rautha turned, faced the big red door across from him through which the gladiator would emerge.

The special gladiator.

The plan Thufir Hawat had devised was admirably simple and direct, Feyd-Rautha thought. The slave would not be drugged—that was the danger. Instead, a key word had been drummed into the man’s unconscious to immobilize his muscles at a critical instant. Feyd-Rautha rolled the vital word in his mind, mouthing it without sound: “Scum!” To the audience, it would appear that an undrugged slave had been slipped into the arena to kill the na-Baron. And all the carefully arranged evidence would point to the slavemaster.

A low humming arose from the red door’s servo-motors as they were armed for opening.

Feyd-Rautha focused all his awareness on the door. This first moment was the critical one. The appearance of the gladiator as he emerged told the trained eye much it needed to know. All gladiators were supposed to be hyped on elacca drug to come out kill-ready in fighting stance—but you had to watch how they hefted the knife, which way they turned in defense, whether they were actually aware of the audience in the stands. The way a slave cocked his head could give the most vital clue to counter and feint.

The red door slammed open.

Out charged a tall, muscular man with shaved head and darkly pitted eyes. His skin was carrot-colored as it should be from the elacca drug, but Feyd-Rautha knew the color was paint. The slave wore green leotards and the red belt of a semishield—the belt’s arrow pointing left to indicate the slave’s left side was shielded. He held his knife sword-fashion, cocked slightly outward in the stance of a trained fighter. Slowly, he advanced into the arena, turning his shielded side toward Feyd-Rautha and the group at the pru-door.

“I like not the look of this one,” said one of Feyd-Rautha’s barb-men. “Are you sure he’s drugged, m’Lord?”

“He has the color,” Feyd-Rautha said.

“Yet he stands like a fighter,” said another helper.

Feyd-Rautha advanced two steps onto the sand, studied this slave.

“What has he done to his arm?” asked one of the distractors.

Feyd-Rautha’s attention went to a bloody scratch on the man’s left forearm, followed the arm down to the hand as it pointed to a design drawn in blood on the left hip of the green leotards—a wet shape there: the formalized outline of a hawk.

Hawk!

Feyd-Rautha looked up into the darkly pitted eyes, saw them glaring at him with uncommon alertness.

It’s one of Duke Leto’s fighting men we took on Arrakis! Feyd-Rautha thought. No simple gladiator this! A chill ran through him, and he wondered if Hawat had another plan for this arena—a feint within a feint within a feint. And only the slavemaster prepared to take the blame!

Feyd-Rautha’s chief handler spoke at his ear: “I like not the look on that one, m’Lord. Let me set a barb or two in his knife arm to try him.”

“I’ll set my own barbs,” Feyd-Rautha said. He took a pair of the long, hooked shafts from the handler, hefted them, testing the balance. These barbs, too, were supposed to be drugged—but not this time, and the chief handler might die because of that. But it was all part of the plan.

“You’ll come out of this a hero, ” Hawat had said. “Killed your gladiator man to man and in spite of treachery. The slavemaster will be executed and your man will step into his spot. ”

Feyd-Rautha advanced another five paces into the arena, playing out the moment, studying the slave. Already, he knew, the experts in the stands above him were aware that something was wrong. The gladiator had the correct skin color for a drugged man, but he stood his ground and did not tremble. The aficionados would be whispering among themselves now: “See how he stands. He should be agitated—attacking or retreating. See how he conserves his strength, how he waits. He should not wait.”

Feyd-Rautha felt his own excitement kindle. Let there be treachery in Hawat’s mind, he thought. I can handle this slave. And it’s my long knife that carries the poison this time, not the short one. Even Hawat doesn’t know that.

“Hai, Harkonnen!” the slave called. “Are you prepared to die?”

Deathly stillness gripped the arena. Slaves did not issue the challenge!

Now, Feyd-Rautha had a clear view of the gladiator’s eyes, saw the cold ferocity of despair in them. He marked the way the man stood, loose and ready, muscles prepared for victory. The slave grapevine had carried Hawat’s message to this one: “You’ll get a true chance to kill the na-Baron. ” That much of the scheme was as they’d planned it, then.

A tight smile crossed Feyd-Rautha’s mouth. He lifted the barbs, seeing success for his plans in the way the gladiator stood.

“Hai! Hai!” the slave challenged, and crept forward two steps.

No one in the galleries can mistake it now, Feyd-Rautha thought.

This slave should have been partly crippled by drug-induced terror. Every movement should have betrayed his inner knowledge that there was no hope for him—he could not win. He should have been filled with the stories of the poisons the na-Baron chose for the blade in his white-gloved hand. The na-Baron never gave quick death; he delighted in demonstrating rare poisons, could stand in the arena pointing out interesting side effects on a writhing victim. There was fear in the slave, yes—but not terror.

Feyd-Rautha lifted the barbs high, nodded in an almost-greeting.

The gladiator pounced.

His feint and defensive counter were as good as any Feyd-Rautha had ever seen. A timed side blow missed by the barest fraction from severing the tendons of the na-Baron’s left leg.

Feyd-Rautha danced away, leaving a barbed shaft in the slave’s right forearm, the hooks completely buried in flesh where the man could not withdraw thim without ripping tendons.

A concerted gasp lifted from the galleries.

The sound filled Feyd-Rautha with elation.

He knew now what his uncle was experiencing, sitting up there with the Fenrings, the observers from the Imperial Court, beside him. There could be no interference with this fight. The forms must be observed in front of witnesses. And the Baron would interpret the events in the arena only one way—threat to himself.

The slave backed, holding knife in teeth and lashing the barbed shaft to his arm with the pennant. “I do not feel your needle!” he shouted. Again he crept forward, knife ready, left side presented, his body bent backward to give it the greatest surface of protection from the half-shield.

That action, too, didn’t escape the galleries. Sharp cries came from the family boxes. Feyd-Rautha’s handlers were calling out to ask if he needed them.

He waved them back to the pru-door.

I’ll give them a show such as they’ve never had before, Feyd-Rautha thought. No tame killing where they can sit back and admire the style. This’ll be something to take them by the guts and twist them. When I’m Baron they’ll remember this day and won’t be a one of them can escape fear of me because of this day.

Feyd-Rautha gave ground slowly before the gladiator’s crablike advance. Arena sand grated underfoot. He heard the slave’s panting, smelled his own sweat and a faint odor of blood on the air.

Steadily, the na-Baron moved backward, turning to the right, his second barb ready. The slave danced sideways. Feyd-Rautha appeared to stumble, heard the scream from the galleries.

Again, the slave pounced.

Gods, what a fighting man! Feyd-Rautha thought as he leaped aside. Only youth’s quickness saved him, but he left the second barb buried in the deltoid muscle of the slave’s right arm.

Shrill cheers rained from the galleries.

They cheer me now, Feyd-Rautha thought. He heard the wildness in the voices just as Hawat had said he would. They’d never cheered a family fighter that way before. And he thought with an edge of grimness on a thing Hawat had told him: “It’s easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.”

Swiftly, Feyd-Rautha retreated to the center of the arena where all could see clearly. He drew his long blade, crouched and waited for the advancing slave.

The man took only the time to lash the second barb tight to his arm, then sped in pursuit.

Let the family see me do this thing, Feyd-Rautha thought. I am their enemy: let them think of me as they see me now.

He drew his short blade.

“I do not fear you, Harkonnen swine,” the gladiator said. “Your tortures cannot hurt a dead man. I can be dead on my own blade before a handler lays finger to my flesh. And I’ll have you dead beside me!”

Feyd-Rautha grinned, offered now the long blade, the one with the poison. “Try this on,” he said, and feinted with the short blade in his other hand.

The slave shifted knife hands, turned inside both parry and feint to grapple the na-Baron’s short blade—the one in the white gloved hand that tradition said should carry the poison.

“You will die, Harkonnen,” the gladiator gasped.

They struggled sideways across the sand. Where Feyd-Rautha’s shield met the slave’s halfshield, a blue glow marked the contact. The air around them filled with ozone from the field.

“Die on your own poison!” the slave grated.

He began forcing the white-gloved hand inward, turning the blade he thought carried the poison.

Let them see this! Feyd-Rautha thought. He brought down the long blade, felt it clang uselessly against the barbed shaft lashed to the slave’s arm.

Feyd-Rautha felt a moment of desperation. He had not thought the barbed shafts would be an advantage for the slave. But they gave the man another shield. And the strength of this gladiator! The short blade was being forced inward inexorably, and Feyd-Rautha focused on the fact that a man could also die on an unpoisoned blade.

“Scum!” Feyd-Rautha gasped.

At the key word, the gladiator’s muscles obeyed with a momentary slackness. It was enough for Feyd-Rautha. He opened a space between them sufficient for the long blade. Its poisoned tip flicked out, drew a red line down the slave’s chest. There was instant agony in the poison. The man disengaged himself, staggered backward.

Now, let my dear family watch, Feyd-Rautha thought. Let them think on this slave who tried to turn the knife he thought poisoned and use it against me. Let them wonder how a gladiator could come into this arena ready for such an attempt. And let them always be aware they cannot know for sure which of my hands carries the poison.

Feyd-Rautha stood in silence, watching the slowed motions of the slave. The man moved within a hesitation-awareness. There was an orthographic thing on his face now for every watcher to recognize. The death was written there. The slave knew it had been done to him and he knew how it had been done. The wrong blade had carried the poison.

“You!” the man moaned.

Feyd-Rautha drew back to give death its space. The paralyzing drug in the poison had yet to take full effect, but the man’s slowness told of its advance.

The slave staggered forward as though drawn by a string—one dragging step at a time. Each step was the only step in his universe. He still clutched his knife, but its point wavered.

“One day … one … of us … will … get … you,” he gasped.

A sad little moue contorted his mouth. He sat, sagged, then stiffened and rolled away from Feyd-Rautha, face down.

Feyd-Rautha advanced in the silent arena, put a toe under the gladiator and rolled him onto his back to give the galleries a clear view of the face when the poison began its twisting, wrenching work on the muscles. But the gladiator came over with his own knife, protruding from his breast.

In spite of frustration, there was for Feyd-Rautha a measure of admiration for the effort this slave had managed in overcoming the paralysis to do this thing to himself. With the admiration came the realization that here was truly a thing to fear.

That which makes a man superhuman is terrifying.

As he focused on this thought, Feyd-Rautha became conscious of the eruption of noise from the stands and galleries around him. They were cheering with utter abandon.

Feyd-Rautha turned, looking up at them.

All were cheering except the Baron, who sat with hand to chin in deep contemplation—and the Count and his lady, both of whom were staring down at him, their faces masked by smiles.

Count Fenring turned to his lady, said: “Ah-h-h-um-m-m, a resourceful um-m-m-m young man. Eh, mm-m-m-ah, my dear?”

“His ah-h-h synaptic responses are very swift,” she said.

The Baron looked at her, at the Count, returned his attention to the arena, thinking: If someone could get that close to one of mine! Rage began to replace his fear. I’ll have the slavemaster dead over a slow fire this night… and if this Count and his lady had a hand in it….

The conversation in the Baron’s box was remote movement to Feyd-Rautha, the voices drowned in the foot-stamping chant that came now from all around:

“Head! Head! Head! Head!”

The Baron scowled, seeing the way Feyd-Rautha turned to him. Languidly, controlling his rage with difficulty, the Baron waved his hand toward the young man standing in the arena beside the sprawled body of the slave. Give the boy a head. He earned it by exposing the slavemaster.

Feyd-Rautha saw the signal of agreement, thought: They think they honor me. Let them see what I think!

He saw his handlers approaching with a saw-knife to do the honors, waved them back, repeated the gesture as they hesitated. They think they honor me with just a head! he thought. He bent and crossed the gladiator’s hands around the protruding knife handle, then removed the knife and placed it in the limp hands.

It was done in an instant, and he straightened, beckoned his handlers. “Bury this slave intact with his knife in his hands,” he said. “The man earned it.”

In the golden box, Count Fenring leaned close to the Baron, said: “A grand gesture, that—true bravura. Your nephew has style as well as courage.”

“He insults the crowd by refusing the head,” the Baron muttered.

“Not at all,” Lady Fenring said. She turned, looking up at the tiers around them.

And the Baron noted the line of her neck—a truly lovely flowing of muscles—like a young boy’s.

“They like what your nephew did,” she said.

As the import of Feyd-Rautha’s gesture penetrated to the most distant seats, as the people saw the handlers carrying off the dead gladiator intact, the Baron watched them and realized she had interpreted the reaction correctly. The people were going wild, beating on each other, screaming and stamping.

The Baron spoke wearily. “I shall have to order a fete. You cannot send people home like this, their energies unspent. They must see that I share their elation.” He gave a hand signal to his guard, and a servant above them dipped the Harkonnen orange pennant over the box—once, twice, three times—signal for a fete.

Feyd-Rautha crossed the arena to stand beneath the golden box, his weapons sheathed, arms hanging at his sides. Above the undiminished frenzy of the crowd, he called: “A fete, Uncle?”

The noise began to subside as people saw the conversation and waited.

“In your honor, Feyd!” the Baron called down. And again, he caused the pennant to be dipped in signal.

Across the arena, the pru-barriers had been dropped and young men were leaping down into the arena, racing toward Feyd-Rautha.

“You ordered the pru-shields dropped, Baron?” the Count asked.

“No one will harm the lad,” the Baron said. “He’s a hero.”

The first of the charging mass reached Feyd-Rautha, lifted him on their shoulders, began parading around the arena.

“He could walk unarmed and unshielded through the poorest quarters of Harko tonight,” the Baron said. “They’d give him the last of their food and drink just for his company.”

The Baron pushed himself from his chair, settled his weight into his suspensors. “You will forgive me, please. There are matters that require my immediate attention. The guard will see you to the keep.”

The Count arose, bowed. “Certainly, Baron. We’re looking forward to the fete. I’ve ah-h-h-mm-m-m never seen a Harkonnen fete.”

“Yes,” the Baron said. “The fete.” He turned, was enveloped by guards as he stepped into the private exit from the box.

A guard captain bowed to Count Fenring. “Your orders, my Lord?”

“We will ah-h-h wait for the worst mm-m-m crush to um-m-m pass,” the Count said.

“Yes, m’Lord.” The man bowed himself back three paces.

Count Fenring faced his lady, spoke again in their personal humming-code tongue: “You saw it, of course?”

In the same humming tongue, she said: “The lad knew the gladiator wouldn’t be drugged. There was a moment of fear, yes, but no surprise.”

“It was planned,” he said. “The entire performance.”

“Without a doubt.”

“It stinks of Hawat.”

“Indeed,” she said.

“I demanded earlier that the Baron eliminate Hawat.”

“That was an error, my dear.”

“I see that now.”

“The Harkonnens may have a new Baron ere long.”

“If that’s Hawat’s plan.”

“That will bear examination, true,” she said.

“The young one will be more amenable to control.”

“For us … after tonight,” she said.

“You don’t anticipate difficulty seducing him, my little brood-mother?”

“No, my love. You saw how he looked at me.”

“Yes, and I can see now why we must have that bloodline.”

“Indeed, and it’s obvious we must have a hold on him. I’ll plant deep in his deepest self the necessary prana-bindu phrases to bend him.”

“We’ll leave as soon as possible—as soon as you’re sure,” he said.

She shuddered. “By all means. I should not want to bear a child in this terrible place.”

“The things we do in the name of humanity,” he said.

“Yours is the easy part,” she said.

“There are some ancient prejudices I overcome,” he said. “They’re quite primordial, you know.”

“My poor dear,” she said, and patted his cheek. “You know this is the only way to be sure of saving that bloodline.”

He spoke in a dry voice: “I quite understand what we do.”

“We won’t fail,” she said.

“Guilt starts as a feeling of failure,” he reminded.

“There’ll be no guilt,” she said. “Hypno-ligation of that Feyd-Rautha’s psyche and his child in my womb—then we go.”

“That uncle,” he said. “Have you ever seen such distortion?”

“He’s pretty fierce,” she said, “but the nephew could well grow to be worse.”

“Thanks to that uncle. You know, when you think what this lad could’ve been with some other upbringing—with the Atreides code to guide him, for example.”

“It’s sad,” she said.

“Would that we could’ve saved both the Atreides youth and this one. From what I heard of that young Paul—a most admirable lad, good union of breeding and training.” He shook his head. “But we shouldn’t waste sorrow over the aristocracy of misfortune.”

“There’s a Bene Gesserit saying,” she said.

“You have sayings for everything!” he protested.

“You’ll like this one,” she said. “It goes: ‘Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.’ ”

***

STILGAR’S TROOP returning to the sietch with its two strays from the desert climbed out of the basin in the waning light of the first moon. The robed figures hurried with the smell of home in their nostrils. Dawn’s gray line behind them was brightest at the notch in their horizon-calendar that marked the middle of autumn, the month of Caprock.

Wind-raked dead leaves strewed the cliffbase where the sietch children had been gathering them, but the sounds of the troop’s passage (except for occasional blunderings by Paul and his mother) could not be distinguished from the natural sounds of the night.

Paul wiped sweat-caked dust from his forehead, felt a tug at his arm, heard Chani’s voice hissing. “Do as I told you: bring the fold of your hood down over your forehead! Leave only the eyes exposed. You waste moisture.”

A whispered command behind them demanded silence: “The desert hears you!”

A bird chirruped from the rocks high above them.

The troop stopped, and Paul sensed abrupt tension.

There came a faint thumping from the rocks, a sound no louder than mice jumping in the sand.

Again, the bird chirruped.

A stir passed through the troop’s ranks. And again, the mouse-thumping pecked its way across the sand.

Once more, the bird chirruped.

The troop resumed its climb up into a crack in the rocks, but there was a stillness of breath about the Fremen now that filled Paul with caution, and he noted covert glances toward Chani, the way she seemed to withdraw, pulling in upon herself.

There was rock underfoot now, a faint gray swishing of robes around them, and Paul sensed a relaxing of discipline, but still that quiet-of-the-person about Chani and the others. He followed a shadow shape—up steps, a turn, more steps, into a tunnel, past two moisture-sealed doors and into a globelighted narrow passage with yellow rock walls and ceiling.

All around him, Paul saw the Fremen throwing back their hoods, removing nose plugs, breathing deeply. Someone sighed. Paul looked for Chani, found that she had left his side. He was hemmed in by a press of robed bodies. Someone jostled him, said, “Excuse me, Usul. What a crush! It’s always this way.”

On his left, the narrow bearded face of the one called Farok turned toward Paul. The stained eyepits and blue darkness of eyes appeared even darker under the yellow globes. “Throw off your hood, Usul,” Farok said. “You’re home.” And he helped Paul, releasing the hood catch, elbowing a space around them.

Paul slipped out his nose plugs, swung the mouth baffle aside. The odor of the place assailed him: unwashed bodies, distillate esthers of reclaimed wastes, everywhere the sour effluvia of humanity with, over it all, a turbulence of spice and spicelike harmonics.

“Why are we waiting, Farok?” Paul asked.

“For the Reverend Mother, I think. You heard the message—poor Chani.”

Poor Chani? Paul asked himself. He looked around, wondering where she was, where his mother had got to in all this crush.

Farok took a deep breath. “The smells of home,” he said.

Paul saw that the man was enjoying the stink of this air, that there was no irony in his tone. He heard his mother cough then, and her voice came back to him through the press of the troop: “How rich the odors of your sietch, Stilgar. I see you do much working with the spice … you make paper … plastics … and isn’t that chemical explosives?”

“You know this from what you smell?” It was another man’s voice.

And Paul realized she was speaking for his benefit that she wanted him to make a quick acceptance of this assault on his nostrils.

There came a buzz of activity at the head of the troop and a prolonged indrawn breath that seemed to pass through the Fremen, and Paul heard hushed voices back down the line: “It’s true then—Liet is dead.”

Liet, Paul thought. Then: Chani, daughter of Liet. The pieces fell together in his mind. Liet was the Fremen name of the planetologist.

Paul looked at Farok, asked: “Is it the Liet known as Kynes?”

“There is only one Liet,” Farok said.

Paul turned, stared at the robed back of a Fremen in front of him. Then Liet-Kynes is dead, he thought.

“It was Harkonnen treachery,” someone hissed. “They made it seem an accident … lost in the desert … a ’thopter crash….”

Paul felt a burst of anger. The man who had befriended them, helped save them from the Harkonnen hunters, the man who had sent his Fremen cohorts searching for two strays in the desert … another victim of the Harkonnens.

“Does Usul hunger yet for revenge?” Farok asked.

Before Paul could answer, there came a low call and the troop swept forward into a wider chamber, carrying Paul with them. He found himself in an open space confronted by Stilgar and a strange woman wearing a flowing wraparound garment of brilliant orange and green. Her arms were bare to the shoulders, and he could see she wore no stillsuit. Her skin was a pale olive. Dark hair swept back from her high forehead, throwing emphasis on sharp cheekbones and aquiline nose between the dense darkness of her eyes.

She turned toward him, and Paul saw golden rings threaded with water tallies dangling from her ears.

“This bested my Jamis?” she demanded.

“Be silent, Harah,” Stilgar said. “It was Jamis’ doing—he invoked the tahaddi al-burhan.”

“He’s not but a boy!” she said. She gave her head a sharp shake from side to side, setting the water tallies to jingling. “My children made fatherless by another child? Surely, ’twas an accident!”

“Usul, how many years have you?” Stilgar asked.

“Fifteen standard,” Paul said.

Stilgar swept his eyes over the troop. “Is there one among you cares to challenge me?”

Silence.

Stilgar looked at the woman. “Until I’ve learned his weirding ways, I’d not challenge him.”

She returned his stare. “But—”

“You saw the stranger woman who went with Chani to the Reverend Mother?” Stilgar asked. “She’s an out-freyn Sayyadina, mother to this lad. The mother and son are masters of the weirding ways of battle.”

“Lisan al-Gaib,” the woman whispered. Her eyes held awe as she turned them back toward Paul.

The legend again, Paul thought.

“Perhaps,” Stilgar said. “It hasn’t been tested, though.” He returned his attention to Paul. “Usul, it’s our way that you’ve now the responsibility for Jamis’ woman here and for his two sons. His yali … his quarters, are yours. His coffee service is yours … and this, his woman.”

Paul studied the woman, wondering: Why isn’t she mourning her man? Why does she show no hate for me? Abruptly, he saw that the Fremen were staring at him, waiting.

Someone whispered: “There’s work to do. Say how you accept her.”

Stilgar said: “Do you accept Harah as woman or servant?”

Harah lifted her arms, turning slowly on one heel. “I am still young, Usul. It’s said I still look as young as when I was with Geoff … before Jamis bested him.”

Jamis killed another to win her, Paul thought.

Paul said: “If I accept her as servant, may I yet change my mind at a later time?”

“You’d have a year to change your decision,” Stilgar said. “After that, she’s a free woman to choose as she wishes … or you could free her to choose for herself at any time. But she’s your responsibility, no matter what, for one year … and you’ll always share some responsibility for the sons of Jamis.”

“I accept her as servant,” Paul said.

Harah stamped a foot, shook her shoulders with anger. “But I’m young!”

Stilgar looked at Paul, said: “Caution’s a worthy trait in a man who’d lead.”

“But I’m young!” Harah repeated.

“Be silent,” Stilgar commanded. “If a thing has merit, it’ll be. Show Usul to his quarters and see he has fresh clothing and a place to rest.”

“Oh-h-h-h!” she said.

Paul had registered enough of her to have a first approximation. He felt the impatience of the troop, knew many things were being delayed here. He wondered if he dared ask the whereabouts of his mother and Chani, saw from Stilgar’s nervous stance that it would be a mistake.

He faced Harah, pitched his voice with tone and tremolo to accent her fear and awe, said: “Show me my quarters, Harah! We will discuss your youth another time.”

She backed away two steps, cast a frightened glance at Stilgar. “He has the weirding voice,” she husked.

“Stilgar,” Paul said. “Chani’s father put heavy obligation on me. If there’s anything….”

“It’ll be decided in council,” Stilgar said. “You can speak then.” He nodded in dismissal, turned away with the rest of the troop following him.

Paul took Harah’s arm, noting how cool her flesh seemed, feeling her tremble. “I’ll not harm you, Harah,” he said. “Show me our quarters.” And he smoothed his voice with relaxants.

“You’ll not cast me out when the year’s gone?” she said. “I know for true I’m not as young as once I was.”

“As long as I live you’ll have a place with me,” he said. He released her arm. “Come now, where are our quarters?”

She turned, led the way down the passage, turning right into a wide cross tunnel lighted by evenly spaced yellow overhead globes. The stone floor was smooth, swept clean of sand.

Paul moved up beside her, studied the aquiline profile as they walked. “You do not hate me, Harah?”

“Why should I hate you?”

She nodded to a cluster of children who stared at them from the raised ledge of a side passage. Paul glimpsed adult shapes behind the children partly hidden by filmy hangings.

“I… bested Jamis.”

“Stilgar said the ceremony was held and you’re a friend of Jamis.” She glanced sidelong at him. “Stilgar said you gave moisture to the dead. Is that truth?”

“Yes.”

“It’s more than I’ll do … can do.”

“Don’t you mourn him?”

“In the time of mourning, I’ll mourn him.”

They passed an arched opening. Paul looked through it at men and women working with stand-mounted machinery in a large, bright chamber. There seemed an extra tempo of urgency to them.

“What’re they doing in there?” Paul asked.

She glanced back as they passed beyond the arch, said: “They hurry to finish the quota in the plastics shop before we flee. We need many dew collectors for the planting.”

“Flee?”

“Until the butchers stop hunting us or are driven from our land.” Paul caught himself in a stumble, sensing an arrested instant of time, remembering a fragment, a visual projection of prescience—but it was displaced, like a montage in motion. The bits of his prescient memory were not quite as he remembered them.

“The Sardaukar hunt us,” he said.

“They’ll not find much excepting an empty sietch or two,” she said. “And they’ll find their share of death in the sand.”

“They’ll find this place?” he asked.

“Likely.”

“Yet we take the time to….” He motioned with his head toward the arch now far behind them. “… make … dew collectors?”

“The planting goes on.”

“What’re dew collectors?” he asked.

The glance she turned on him was full of surprise. “Don’t they teach you anything in the… wherever it is you come from?”

“Not about dew collectors.”

“Hai!” she said, and there was a whole conversation in the one word.

“Well, what are they?”

“Each bush, each weed you see out there in the erg,” she said, “how do you suppose it lives when we leave it? Each is planted most tenderly in its own little pit. The pits are filled with smooth ovals of chromoplastic. Light turns them white. You can see them glistening in the dawn if you look down from a high place. White reflects. But when Old Father Sun departs, the chromoplastic reverts to transparency in the dark. It cools with extreme rapidity. The surface condenses moisture out of the air. That moisture trickles down to keep our plants alive.”

“Dew collectors,” he muttered, enchanted by the simple beauty of such a scheme.

“I’ll mourn Jamis in the proper time for it,” she said, as though her mind had not left his other question. “He was a good man, Jamis, but quick to anger. A good provider, Jamis, and a wonder with the children. He made no separation between Geoff’s boy, my firstborn, and his own true son. They were equal in his eyes.” She turned a questing stare on Paul. “Would it be that way with you, Usul?”

“We don’t have that problem.”

“But if—”

“Harah!”

She recoiled at the harsh edge in his voice.

They passed another brightly lighted room visible through an arch on their left. “What’s made there?” he asked.

“They repair the weaving machinery,” she said. “But it must be dismantled by tonight. ” She gestured at a tunnel branching to their left. “Through there and beyond, that’s food processing and stillsuit maintenance.” She looked at Paul. “Your suit looks new. But if it needs work, I’m good with suits. I work in the factory in season.”

They began coming on knots of people now and thicker clusterings of openings in the tunnel’s sides. A file of men and women passed them carrying packs that gurgled heavily, the smell of spice strong about them.

“They’ll not get our water,” Harah said. “Or our spice. You can be sure of that.”

Paul glanced at the openings in the tunnel walls, seeing the heavy carpets on the raised ledge, glimpses of rooms with bright fabrics on the walls, piled cushions. People in the openings fell silent at their approach, followed Paul with untamed stares.

“The people find it strange you bested Jamis,” Harah said. “Likely you’ll have some proving to do when we’re settled in a new sietch.”

“I don’t like killing,” he said.

“Thus Stilgar tells it,” she said, but her voice betrayed her disbelief.

A shrill chanting grew louder ahead of them. They came to another side opening wider than any of the others Paul had seen. He slowed his pace, staring in at a room crowded with children sitting cross-legged on a maroon-carpeted floor.

At a chalkboard against the far wall stood a woman in a yellow wraparound, a projecto-stylus in one hand. The board was filled with designs—circles, wedges and curves, snake tracks and squares, flowing arcs split by parallel lines. The woman pointed to the designs one after the other as fast as she could move the stylus, and the children chanted in rhythm with her moving hand.

Paul listened, hearing the voices grow dimmer behind as he moved deeper into the sietch with Harah.

“Tree,” the children chanted. “Tree, grass, dune, wind, mountain, hill, fire, lightning, rock, rocks, dust, sand, heat, shelter, heat, full, winter, cold, empty, erosion, summer, cavern, day, tension, moon, night, caprock, sandtide, slope, planting, binder….”

“You conduct classes at a time like this?” Paul asked.

Her face went somber and grief edged her voice: “What Liet taught us, we cannot pause an instant in that. Liet who is dead must not be forgotten. It’s the Chakobsa way.”

She crossed the tunnel to the left, stepped up onto a ledge, parted gauzy orange hangings and stood aside: “Your yali is ready for you, Usul.”

Paul hesitated before joining her on the ledge. He felt a sudden reluctance to be alone with this woman. It came to him that he was surrounded by a way of life that could only be understood by postulating an ecology of ideas and values. He felt that this Fremen world was fishing for him, trying to snare him in its ways. And he knew what lay in that snare—the wild jihad, the religious war he felt he should avoid at any cost.

“This is your yali,” Harah said. “Why do you hesitate?”

Paul nodded, joined her on the ledge. He lifted the hangings across from her, feeling metal fibers in the fabric, followed her into a short entrance way and then into a larger room, square, about six meters to a side—thick blue carpets on the floor, blue and green fabrics hiding the rock walls, glowglobes tuned to yellow overhead bobbing against draped yellow ceiling fabrics.

The effect was that of an ancient tent.

Harah stood in front of him, left hand on hip, her eyes studying his face. “The children are with a friend,” she said. “They will present themselves later.”

Paul masked his unease beneath a quick scanning of the room. Thin hangings to the right, he saw, partly concealed a larger room with cushions piled around the walls. He felt a soft breeze from an air duct, saw the outlet cunningly hidden in a pattern of hangings directly ahead of him.

“Do you wish me to help you remove your stillsuit?” Harah asked.

“No… thank you.”

“Shall I bring food?”

“Yes.”

“There is a reclamation chamber off the other room.” She gestured. “For your comfort and convenience when you’re out of your stillsuit.”

“You said we have to leave this sietch,” Paul said. “Shouldn’t we be packing or something?”

“It will be done in its time,” she said. “The butchers have yet to penetrate to our region.”

Still she hesitated, staring at him.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“You’ve not the eyes of the Ibad,” she said. “It’s strange but not entirely unattractive.”

“Get the food,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

She smiled at him—a knowing, woman’s smile that he found disquieting. “I am your servant,” she said, and whirled away in one lithe motion, ducking behind a heavy wall hanging that revealed another passage before falling back into place.

Feeling angry with himself, Paul brushed through the thin hanging on the right and into the larger room. He stood there a moment caught by uncertainty. And he wondered where Chani was… Chani who had just lost her father.

We’re alike in that, he thought.

A wailing cry sounded from the outer corridors, its volume muffled by the intervening hangings. It was repeated, a bit more distant. And again. Paul realized someone was calling the time. He focused on the fact that he had seen no clocks.

The faint smell of burning creosote bush came to his nostrils, riding on the omnipresent stink of the sietch. Paul saw that he had already suppressed the odorous assault on his senses.

And he wondered again about his mother, how the moving montage of the future would incorporate her… and the daughter she bore. Mutable time-awareness danced around him. He shook his head sharply, focusing his attention on the evidences that spoke of profound depth and breadth in this Fremen culture that had swallowed them.

With its subtle oddities.

He had seen a thing about the caverns and this room, a thing that suggested far greater differences than anything he had yet encountered.

There was no sign of a poison snooper here, no indication of their use anywhere in the cave warren. Yet he could smell poisons in the sietch stench—strong ones, common ones.

He heard a rustle of hangings, thought it was Harah returning with food, and turned to watch her. Instead, from beneath a displaced pattern of hangings, he saw two young boys—perhaps aged nine and ten—staring out at him with greedy eyes. Each wore a small kindjal-type of crysknife, rested a hand on the hilt.

And Paul recalled the stories of the Fremen—that their children fought as ferociously as the adults.

***

PHOSPHORTUBES IN the faraway upper reaches of the cavern cast a dim light onto the thronged interior, hinting at the great size of this rock-enclosed space… larger, Jessica saw, than even the Gathering Hall of her Bene Gesserit school. She estimated there were more than five thousand people gathered out there beneath the ledge where she stood with Stilgar.

And more were coming.

The air was murmurous with people.

“Your son has been summoned from his rest, Sayyadina,” Stilgar said. “Do you wish him to share in your decision?”

“Could he change my decision?”

“Certainly, the air with which you speak comes from your own lungs, but—”

“The decision stands,” she said.

But she felt misgivings, wondering if she should use Paul as an excuse for backing out of a dangerous course. There was an unborn daughter to think of as well. What endangered the flesh of the mother endangered the flesh of the daughter.

Men came with rolled carpets, grunting under the weight of them, stirring up dust as the loads were dropped onto the ledge.

Stilgar took her arm, led her back into the acoustical horn that formed the rear limits of the ledge. He indicated a rock bench within the horn. “The Reverend Mother will sit here, but you may rest yourself until she comes.”

“I prefer to stand,” Jessica said.

She watched the men unroll the carpets, covering the ledge, looked out at the crowd. There were at least ten thousand people on the rock floor now.

And still they came.

Out on the desert, she knew, it already was red nightfall, but here in the cavern hall was perpetual twilight, a gray vastness thronged with people come to see her risk her life.

A way was opened through the crowd to her right, and she saw Paul approaching flanked by two small boys. There was a swaggering air of self-importance about the children. They kept hands on knives, scowled at the wall of people on either side.

“The sons of Jamis who are now the sons of Usul,” Stilgar said. “They take their escort duties seriously.” He ventured a smile at Jessica.

Jessica recognized the effort to lighten her mood and was grateful for it, but could not take her mind from the danger that confronted her.

I had no choice but to do this, she thought. We must move swiftly if we’re to secure our place among these Fremen.

Paul climbed to the ledge, leaving the children below. He stopped in front of his mother, glanced at Stilgar, back to Jessica. “What is happening? I thought I was being summoned to council.”

Stilgar raised a hand for silence, gestured to his left where another way had been opened in the throng. Chani came down the lane opened there, her elfin face set in lines of grief. She had removed her stillsuit and wore a graceful blue wraparound that exposed her thin arms. Near the shoulder on her left arm, a green kerchief had been tied.

Green for mourning, Paul thought.

It was one of the customs the two sons of Jamis had explained to him by indirection, telling him they wore no green because they accepted him as guardian-father.

“Are you the Lisan al-Gaib?” they had asked. And Paul had sensed the jihad in their words, shrugged off the question with one of his own—learning then that Kaleff, the elder of the two, was ten, and the natural son of Geoff. Orlop, the younger, was eight, the natural son of Jamis.

It had been a strange day with these two standing guard over him because he asked it, keeping away the curious, allowing him the time to nurse his thoughts and prescient memories, to plan a way to prevent the jihad.

Now, standing beside his mother on the cavern ledge and looking out at the throng, he wondered if any plan could prevent the wild outpouring of fanatic legions.

Chani, nearing the ledge, was followed at a distance by four women carrying another woman in a litter.

Jessica ignored Chani’s approach, focusing all her attention on the woman in the litter—a crone, a wrinkled and shriveled ancient thing in a black gown with hood thrown back to reveal the tight knot of gray hair and the stringy neck.

The litter-carriers deposited their burden gently on the ledge from below, and Chani helped the old woman to her feet.

So this is their Reverend Mother, Jessica thought.

The old woman leaned heavily on Chani as she hobbled toward Jessica, looking like a collection of sticks draped in the black robe. She stopped in front of Jessica, peered upward for a long moment before speaking in a husky whisper.

“So you’re the one.” The old head nodded once precariously on the thin neck. “The Shadout Mapes was right to pity you.”

Jessica spoke quickly, scornfully: “I need no one’s pity.”

“That remains to be seen,” husked the old woman. She turned with surprising quickness and faced the throng. “Tell them, Stilgar.”

“Must I?” he asked.

“We are the people of Misr,” the old woman rasped. “Since our Sunni ancestors fled from Nilotic al-Ourouba, we have known flight and death. The young go on that our people shall not die.”

Stilgar took a deep breath, stepped forward two paces.

Jessica felt the hush come over the crowded cavern—some twenty thousand people now, standing silently, almost without movement. It made her feel suddenly small and filled with caution.

“Tonight we must leave this sietch that has sheltered us for so long and go south into the desert,” Stilgar said. His voice boomed out across the uplifted faces, reverberating with the force given it by the acoustical horn behind the ledge.

Still the throng remained silent.

“The Reverend Mother tells me she cannot survive another hajra,” Stilgar said. “We have lived before without a Reverend Mother, but it is not good for people to seek a new home in such straits.”

Now, the throng stirred, rippling with whispers and currents of disquiet.

“That this may not come to pass,” Stilgar said, “our new Sayyadina Jessica of the Weirding, has consented to enter the rite at this time. She will attempt to pass within that we not lose the strength of our Reverend Mother.”

Jessica of the Weirding, Jessica thought. She saw Paul staring at her, his eyes filled with questions, but his mouth held silent by all the strangeness around them.

If I die in the attempt, what will become of him? Jessica asked herself. Again she felt the misgivings fill her mind.

Chani led the old Reverend Mother to a rock bench deep in the acoustical horn, returned to stand beside Stilgar.

“That we may not lose all if Jessica of the Weirding should fail,” Stilgar said, “Chani, daughter of Liet, will be consecrated in the Sayyadina at this time.” He stepped one pace to the side.

From deep in the acoustical horn, the old woman’s voice came out to them, an amplified whisper, harsh and penetrating: “Chani has returned from her hajra—Chani has seen the waters.”

A sussurant response arose from the crowd: “She has seen the waters.”

“I consecrate the daughter of Liet in the Sayyadina,” husked the old woman.

“She is accepted,” the crowd responded.

Paul barely heard the ceremony, his attention still centered on what had been said of his mother.

If she should fail?

He turned and looked back at the one they called Reverend Mother, studying the dried crone features, the fathomless blue fixation of her eyes. She looked as though a breeze would blow her away, yet there was that about her which suggested she might stand untouched in the path of a coriolis storm. She carried the same aura of power that he remembered from the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam who had tested him with agony in the way of the gom jabbar.

“I, the Reverend Mother Ramallo, whose voice speaks as a multitude, say this to you,” the old woman said. “It is fitting that Chani enter the Sayyadina.”

“It is fitting,” the crowd responded.

The old woman nodded, whispered: “I give her the silver skies, the golden desert and its shining rocks, the green fields that will be. I give these to Sayyadina Chani. And lest she forget that she’s servant of us all, to her fall the menial tasks in this Ceremony of the Seed. Let it be as Shai-hulud will have it.” She lifted a brown-stick arm, dropped it.

Jessica, feeling the ceremony close around her with a current that swept her beyond all turning back, glanced once at Paul’s question-filled face, then prepared herself for the ordeal.

“Let the watermasters come forward,” Chani said with only the slightest quaver of uncertainty in her girl-child voice.

Now, Jessica felt herself at the focus of danger, knowing its presence in the watchfulness of the throng, in the silence.

A band of men made its way through a serpentine path opened in the crowd, moving up from the back in pairs. Each pair carried a small skin sack, perhaps twice the size of a human head. The sacks sloshed heavily.

The two leaders deposited their load at Chani’s feet on the ledge and stepped back.

Jessica looked at the sack, then at the men. They had their hoods thrown back, exposing long hair tied in a roll at the base of the neck. The black pits of their eyes stared back at her without wavering.

A furry redolence of cinnamon arose from the sack, wafted across Jessica. The spice? she wondered.

“Is there water?” Chani asked.

The watermaster on the left, a man with a purple scar line across the bridge of his nose, nodded once. “There is water, Sayyadina,” he said, “but we cannot drink of it.”

“Is there seed?” Chani asked.

“There is seed,” the man said.

Chani knelt and put her hands to the sloshing sack. “Blessed is the water and its seed.”

There was familiarity to the rite, and Jessica looked back at the Reverend Mother Ramallo. The old woman’s eyes were closed and she sat hunched over as though asleep.

“Sayyadina Jessica,” Chani said.

Jessica turned to see the girl staring up at her.

“Have you tasted the blessed water?” Chani asked.

Before Jessica could answer, Chani said: “It is not possible that you have tasted the blessed water. You are outworlder and unprivileged.”

A sigh passed through the crowd, a sussuration of robes that made the nape hairs creep on Jessica’s neck.

“The crop was large and the maker has been destroyed,” Chani said. She began unfastening a coiled spout fixed to the top of the sloshing sack.

Now, Jessica felt the sense of danger boiling around her. She glanced at Paul, saw that he was caught up in the mystery of the ritual and had eyes only for Chani.

Has he seen this moment in time? Jessica wondered. She rested a hand on her abdomen, thinking of the unborn daughter there, asking herself: Do I have the right to risk us both?

Chani lifted the spout toward Jessica, said: “Here is the Water of Life, the water that is greater than water—Kan, the water that frees the soul. If you be a Reverend Mother, it opens the universe to you. Let Shai-hulud judge now.”

Jessica felt herself torn between duty to her unborn child and duty to Paul. For Paul, she knew, she should take that spout and drink of the sack’s contents, but as she bent to the proffered spout, her senses told her its peril.

The stuff in the sack had a bitter smell subtly akin to many poisons that she knew, but unlike them, too.

“You must drink it now,” Chani said.

There’s no turning back, Jessica reminded herself. But nothing in all her Bene Gesserit training came into her mind to help her through this instant.

What is it? Jessica asked herself. Liquor? A drug?

She bent over the spout, smelled the esthers of cinnamon, remembering then the drunkenness of Duncan Idaho. Spice liquor? she asked herself. She took the siphon tube in her mouth, pulled up only the most minuscule sip. It tasted of the spice, a faint bite acrid on the tongue.

Chani pressed down on the skin bag. A great gulp of the stuff surged into Jessica’s mouth and before she could help herself, she swallowed it, fighting to retain her calmness and dignity.

“To accept a little death is worse than death itself,” Chani said. She stared at Jessica, waiting.

And Jessica stared back, still holding the spout in her mouth. She tasted the sack’s contents in her nostrils, in the roof of her mouth, in her cheeks, in her eyes—a biting sweetness, now.

Cool.

Again, Chani sent the liquid gushing into Jessica’s mouth.

Delicate.

Jessica studied Chani’s face—elfin features—seeing the traces of Liet-Kynes there as yet unfixed by time.

This is a drug they feed me, Jessica told herself.

But it was unlike any other drug of her experience, and Bene Gesserit training included the taste of many drugs.

Chani’s features were so clear, as though outlined in light.

A drug.

Whirling silence settled around Jessica. Every fiber of her body accepted the fact that something profound had happened to it. She felt that she was a conscious mote, smaller than any subatomic particle, yet capable of motion and of sensing her surroundings. Like an abrupt revelation—the curtains whipped away—she realized she had become aware of a psychokinesthetic extension of herself. She was the mote, yet not the mote.

The cavern remained around her—the people. She sensed them: Paul, Chani, Stilgar, the Reverend Mother Ramallo.

Reverend Mother!

At the school there had been rumors that some did not survive the Reverend Mother ordeal, that the drug took them.

Jessica focused her attention on the Reverend Mother Ramallo, aware now that all this was happening in a frozen instant of time—suspended time for her alone.

Why is time suspended? she asked herself. She stared at the frozen expressions around her, seeing a dust mote above Chani’s head, stopped there.

Waiting.

The answer to this instant came like an explosion in her consciousness : her personal time was suspended to save her life.

She focused on the psychokinesthetic extension of herself, looking within, and was confronted immediately with a cellular core, a pit of blackness from which she recoiled.

That is the place where we cannot look, she thought. There is the place the Reverend Mothers are so reluctant to mention—the place where only a Kwisatz Haderach may look.

This realization returned a small measure of confidence, and again she ventured to focus on the psychokinesthetic extension, becoming a mote-self that searched within her for danger.

She found it within the drug she had swallowed.

The stuff was dancing particles within her, its motions so rapid that even frozen time could not stop them. Dancing particles. She began recognizing familiar structures, atomic linkages: a carbon atom here, helical wavering… a glucose molecule. An entire chain of molecules confronted her, and she recognized a protein… a methyl-protein configuration.

Ah-h-h!

It was a soundless mental sigh within her as she saw the nature of the poison.

With her psychokinesthetic probing, she moved into it, shifted an oxygen mote, allowed another carbon mote to link, reattached a linkage of oxygen… hydrogen.

The change spread… faster and faster as the catalyzed reaction opened its surface of contact.

The suspension of time relaxed its hold upon her, and she sensed motion. The tube spout from the sack was touched to her mouth-gently, collecting a drop of moisture.

Chani’s taking the catalyst from my body to change the poison in that sack, Jessica thought. Why?

Someone eased her to a sitting position. She saw the old Reverend Mother Ramallo being brought to sit beside her on the carpeted ledge. A dry hand touched her neck.

And there was another psychokinesthetic mote within her awareness! Jessica tried to reject it, but the mote swept closer… closer.

They touched!

It was like an ultimate simpatico, being two people at once: not telepathy, but mutual awareness.

With the old Reverend Mother!

But Jessica saw that the Reverend Mother didn’t think of herself as old. An image unfolded before the mutual mind’s eye: a young girl with a dancing spirit and tender humor.

Within the mutual awareness, the young girl said, “Yes, that is how I am.”

Jessica could only accept the words, not respond to them.

“You’ll have it all soon, Jessica,” the inward image said.

This is hallucination, Jessica told herself.

“You know better than that,” the inward image said. “Swiftly now, do not fight me. There isn’t much time. We….” There came a long pause, then: “You should’ve told us you were pregnant!”

Jessica found the voice that talked within the mutual awareness. “Why?”

“This changes both of you! Holy Mother, what have we done?”

Jessica sensed a forced shift in the mutual awareness, saw another mote-presence with the inward eye. The other mote darted wildly here, there, circling. It radiated pure terror.

“You’ll have to be strong,” the old Reverend Mother’s image-presence said. “Be thankful it’s a daughter you carry. This would’ve killed a male fetus. Now… carefully, gently… touch your daughter-presence. Be your daughter-presence. Absorb the fear… soothe… use your courage and your strength… gently now… gently….”

The other whirling mote swept near, and Jessica compelled herself to touch it.

Terror threatened to overwhelm her.

She fought it the only way she knew: “I shall not fear. Fear is the mind killer…. ”

The litany brought a semblance of calm. The other mote lay quiescent against her.

Words won’t work, Jessica told herself.

She reduced herself to basic emotional reactions, radiated love, comfort, a warm snuggling of protection.

The terror receded.

Again, the presence of the old Reverend Mother asserted itself, but now there was a tripling of mutual awareness—two active and one that lay quietly absorbing.

“Time compels me,” the Reverend Mother said within the awareness. “I have much to give you. And I do not know if your daughter can accept all this while remaining sane. But it must be: the needs of the tribe are paramount.”

“What—”

“Remain silent and accept!”

Experiences began to unroll before Jessica. It was like a lecture strip in a subliminal training projector at the Bene Gesserit school… but faster… blindingly faster.

Yet… distinct.

She knew each experience as it happened: there was a lover—virile, bearded, with the Fremen eyes, and Jessica saw his strength and tenderness, all of him in one blink-moment, through the Reverend Mother’s memory.

There was no time now to think of what this might be doing to the daughter fetus, only time to accept and record. The experiences poured in on Jessica—birth, life, death—important matters and unimportant, an outpouring of single-view time.

Why should a fall of sand from a clifftop stick in the memory? she asked herself.

Too late, Jessica saw what was happening: the old woman was dying and, in dying, pouring her experiences into Jessica’s awareness as water is poured into a cup. The other mote faded back into pre-birth awareness as Jessica watched it. And, dying-in-conception, the old Reverend Mother left her life in Jessica’s memory with one last sighing blur of words.

“I’ve been a long time waiting for you,” she said. “Here is my life.”

There it was, encapsuled, all of it.

Even the moment of death.

I am now a Reverend Mother, Jessica realized.

And she knew with a generalized awareness that she had become, in truth, precisely what was meant by a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. The poison drug had transformed her.

This wasn’t exactly how they did it at the Bene Gesserit school, she knew. No one had ever introduced her to the mysteries of it, but she knew.

The end result was the same.

Jessica sensed the daughter-mote still touching her inner awareness, probed it without response.

A terrible sense of loneliness crept through Jessica in the realization of what had happened to her. She saw her own life as a pattern that had slowed and all life around her speeded up so that the dancing interplay became clearer.

The sensation of mote-awareness faded slightly, its intensity easing as her body relaxed from the threat of the poison, but still she felt that other mote, touching it with a sense of guilt at what she had allowed to happen to it.

I did it, my poor, unformed, dear little daughter, I brought you into this universe and exposed your awareness to all its varieties without any defenses.

A tiny outflowing of love-comfort, like a reflection of what she had poured into it, came from the other mote.

Before Jessica could respond, she felt the adab presence of demanding memory. There was something that needed doing. She groped for it, realizing she was being impeded by a muzziness of the changed drug permeating her senses.

I could change that, she thought. I could take away the drug action and make it harmless. But she sensed this would be an error. I’m within a rite of joining.

Then she knew what she had to do.

Jessica opened her eyes, gestured to the watersack now being held above her by Chani.

“It has been blessed,” Jessica said. “Mingle the waters, let the change come to all, that the people may partake and share in the blessing.”

Let the catalyst do its work, she thought. Let the people drink of it and have their awareness of each other heightened for awhile. The drug is safe now… now that a Reverend Mother has changed it.

Still, the demanding memory worked on her, thrusting. There was another thing she had to do, she realized, but the drug made it difficult to focus.

Ah-h-h-h-h … the old Reverend Mother.

“I have met the Reverend Mother Ramallo,” Jessica said. “She is gone, but she remains. Let her memory be honored in the rite.”

Now, where did I get those words? Jessica wondered.

And she realized they came from another memory, the life that had been given to her and now was part of herself. Something about that gift felt incomplete, though.

“Let them have their orgy, ” the other-memory said within her. “They’ve little enough pleasure out of living. Yes, and you and I need this little time to become acquainted before I recede and pour out through your memories. Already, I feel myself being tied to bits of you. Ah-h-h, you’ve a mind filled with interesting things. So many things I’d never imagined.”

And the memory-mind encapsulated within her opened itself to Jessica, permitting a view down a wide corridor to other Reverend Mothers until there seemed no end to them.

Jessica recoiled, fearing she would become lost in an ocean of oneness. Still, the corridor remained, revealing to Jessica that the Fremen culture was far older than she had suspected.

There had been Fremen on Poritrin, she saw, a people grown soft with an easy planet, fair game for Imperial raiders to harvest and plant human colonies on Bela Tegeuse and Salusa Secundus.

Oh, the wailing Jessica sensed in that parting.

Far down the corridor, an image-voice screamed: “They denied us the Hajj!”

Jessica saw the slave cribs on Bela Tegeuse down that inner corridor, saw the weeding out and the selecting that spread men to Rossak and Harmonthep. Scenes of brutal ferocity opened to her like the petals of a terrible flower. And she saw the thread of the past carried by Sayyadina after Sayyadina—first by word of mouth, hidden in the sand chanteys, then refined through their own Reverend Mothers with the discovery of the poison drug on Rossak … and now developed to subtle strength on Arrakis in the discovery of the Water of Life.

Far down the inner corridor, another voice screamed: “Never to forgive! Never to forget!”

But Jessica’s attention was focused on the revelation of the Water of Life, seeing its source: the liquid exhalation of a dying sandworm, a maker. And as she saw the killing of it in her new memory, she suppressed a gasp.

The creature was drowned!

“Mother, are you all right?”

Paul’s voice intruded on her, and Jessica struggled out of the inner awareness to stare up at him, conscious of duty to him, but resenting his presence.

I’m like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness—until one day the ability to feel is forced into them.

The thought hung in her mind, an enclosing awareness.

And I say: “Look! I have no hands!” But the people all around me say: “What are hands?”

“Are you all right?” Paul repeated.

“Yes.”

“Is this all right for me to drink?” He gestured to the sack in Chani’s hands. “They want me to drink it.”

She heard the hidden meaning in his words, realized he had detected the poison in the original, unchanged substance, that he was concerned for her. It occurred to Jessica then to wonder about the limits of Paul’s prescience. His question revealed much to her.

“You may drink it,” she said. “It has been changed.” And she looked beyond him to see Stilgar staring down at her, the dark-dark eyes studying.

“Now, we know you cannot be false,” he said.

She sensed hidden meaning here, too, but the muzziness of the drug was overpowering her senses. How warm it was and soothing. How beneficent these Fremen to bring her into the fold of such companionship.

Paul saw the drug take hold of his mother.

He searched his memory—the fixed past, the flux-lines of the possible futures. It was like scanning through arrested instants of time, disconcerting to the lens of the inner eye. The fragments were difficult to understand when snatched out of the flux.

This drug—he could assemble knowledge about it, understand what it was doing to his mother, but the knowledge lacked a natural rhythm, lacked a system of mutual reflection.

He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future.

Things persisted in not being what they seemed.

“Drink it,” Chani said. She waved the hornspout of a watersack under his nose.

Paul straightened, staring at Chani. He felt carnival excitement in the air. He knew what would happen if he drank this spice drug with its quintessence of the substance that brought the change onto him. He would return to the vision of pure time, of time-become-space. It would perch him on the dizzying summit and defy him to understand.

From behind Chani, Stilgar said: “Drink it, lad. You delay the rite.”

Paul listened to the crowd then, hearing the wildness in their voices—“Lisan al-Gaib,” they said. “Muad’Dib!” He looked down at his mother. She appeared peacefully asleep in a sitting position—her breathing even and deep. A phrase out of the future that was his lonely past came into his mind: “She sleeps in the Waters of Life. ”

Chani tugged at his sleeve.

Paul took the hornspout into his mouth, hearing the people shout. He felt the liquid gush into his throat as Chani pressed the sack, sensed giddiness in the fumes. Chani removed the spout, handed the sack into hands that reached for it from the floor of the cavern. His eyes focused on her arm, the green band of mourning there.

As she straightened, Chani saw the direction of his gaze, said: “I can mourn him even in the happiness of the waters. This was something he gave us.” She put her hand into his, pulling him along the ledge. “We are alike in a thing, Usul: We have each lost a father to the Harkonnens.”

Paul followed her. He felt that his head had been separated from his body and restored with odd connections. His legs were remote and rubbery.

They entered a narrow side passage, its walls dimly lighted by spaced-out glowglobes. Paul felt the drug beginning to have its unique effect on him, opening time like a flower. He found need to steady himself against Chani as they turned through another shadowed tunnel. The mixture of whipcord and softness he felt beneath her robe stirred his blood. The sensation mingled with the work of the drug, folding future and past into the present, leaving him the thinnest margin of trinocular focus.

“I know you, Chani,” he whispered. “We’ve sat upon a ledge above the sand while I soothed your fears. We’ve caressed in the dark of the sietch. We’ve….” He found himself losing focus, tried to shake his head, stumbled.

Chani steadied him, led him through thick hangings into the yellow warmth of a private apartment—low tables, cushions, a sleeping pad beneath an orange spread.

Paul grew aware that they had stopped, that Chani stood facing him, and that her eyes betrayed a look of quiet terror.

“You must tell me,” she whispered.

“You are Sihaya,” he said, “the desert spring.”

“When the tribe shares the Water,” she said, “we’re together—ail of us. We … share. I can… sense the others with me, but I’m afraid to share with you.”

“Why?”

He tried to focus on her, but past and future were merging into the present, blurring her image. He saw her in countless ways and positions and settings.

“There’s something frightening in you,” she said. “When I took you away from the others… I did it because I could feel what the others wanted. You… press on people. You… make us see things!”

He forced himself to speak distinctly: “What do you see?”

She looked down at her hands. “I see a child… in my arms. It’s our child, yours and mine.” She put a hand to her mouth. “How can I know every feature of you?”

They’ve a little of the talent, his mind told him. But they suppress it because it terrifies.

In a moment of clarity, he saw how Chani was trembling.

“What is it you want to say?” he asked.

“Usul,” she whispered, and still she trembled.

“You cannot back into the future,” he said.

A profound compassion for her swept through him. He pulled her against him, stroked her head. “Chani, Chani, don’t fear.”

“Usul, help me,” she cried.

As she spoke, he felt the drug complete its work within him, ripping away the curtains to let him see the distant gray turmoil of his future.

“You’re so quiet,” Chani said.

He held himself poised in the awareness, seeing time stretch out in its weird dimension, delicately balanced yet whirling, narrow yet spread like a net gathering countless worlds and forces, a tightwire that he must walk, yet a teeter-totter on which he balanced.

On one side he could see the Imperium, a Harkonnen called Feyd-Rautha who flashed toward him like a deadly blade, the Sardaukar raging off their planet to spread pogrom on Arrakis, the Guild conniving and plotting, the Bene Gesserit with their scheme of selective breeding. They lay massed like a thunderhead on his horizon, held back by no more than the Fremen and their Muad’Dib, the sleeping giant Fremen poised for their wild crusade across the universe.

Paul felt himself at the center, at the pivot where the whole structure turned, walking a thin wire of peace with a measure of happiness, Chani at his side. He could see it stretching ahead of him, a time of relative quiet in a hidden sietch, a moment of peace between periods of violence.

“There’s no other place for peace,” he said.

“Usul, you’re crying,” Chani murmured. “Usul, my strength, do you give moisture to the dead? To whose dead?”

“To ones not yet dead,” he said.

“Then let them have their time of life,” she said.

He sensed through the drug fog how right she was, pulled her against him with savage pressure. “Sihaya!” he said.

She put a palm against his cheek, “I’m no longer afraid, Usul. Look at me. I see what you see when you hold me thus.”

“What do you see?” he demanded.

“I see us giving love to each other in a time of quiet between storms. It’s what we were meant to do.”

The drug had him again and he thought: So many times you’ve given me comfort and forgetfulness. He felt anew the hyperillumination with its high-relief imagery of time, sensed his future becoming memories—the tender indignities of physical love, the sharing and communion of selves, the softness and the violence.

“You’re the strong one, Chani,” he muttered. “Stay with me.”

“Always,” she said, and kissed his cheek.