Dune (10 page)

“As you will, my Lady,” Mapes said.

Jessica turned away, thinking: Hawat may have passed this residency as safe,
but there’s something wrong about the place. I can feel it.

An urgent need to see her son gripped Jessica. She began walking toward the
arched doorway that led into the passage to the dining hall and the family
wings. Faster and faster she walked until she was almost running.

Behind her, Mapes paused in clearing the wrappings from the bull’s head,
looked at the retreating back. “She’s the One all right,” she muttered. “Poor
thing.”

= = = = = =

“Yueh! Yueh! Yueh!” goes the refrain. “A million deaths were not enough for
Yueh!”
-from “A Child’s History of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan

The door stood ajar, and Jessica stepped through it into a room with yellow
walls. To her left stretched a low settee of black hide and two empty bookcases,
a hanging waterflask with dust on its bulging sides. To her right, bracketing
another door, stood more empty bookcases, a desk from Caladan and three chairs.
At the windows directly ahead of her stood Dr. Yueh, his back to her, his
attention fixed upon the outside world.

Jessica took another silent step into the room.

She saw that Yueh’s coat was wrinkled, a white smudge near the left elbow as
though he had leaned against chalk. He looked, from behind, like a fleshless
stick figure in overlarge black clothing, a caricature poised for stringy
movement at the direction of a puppet master. Only the squarish block of head
with long ebony hair caught in its silver Suk School ring at the shoulder seemed
alive–turning slightly to follow some movement outside.

Again, she glanced around the room, seeing no sign of her son, but the
closed door on her right, she knew, let into a small bedroom for which Paul had
expressed a liking.

“Good afternoon. Dr. Yueh,” she said. “Where’s Paul?”

He nodded as though to something out the window, spoke in an absent manner
without turning: “Your son grew tired, Jessica. I sent him into the next room to
rest.”

Abruptly, he stiffened, whirled with mustache flopping over his purpled
lips. “Forgive me, my Lady! My thoughts were far away . . . I . . . did not mean
to be familiar.”

She smiled, held out her right hand. For a moment, she was afraid he might
kneel. “Wellington, please.”

“To use your name like that . . . I . . . ”

“We’ve known each other six years,” she said. “It’s long past time
formalities should’ve been dropped between us–in private.”
Yueh ventured a thin smile, thinking: I believe it has worked. Now, she’ll
think anything unusual in my manner is due to embarrassment. She’ll not look for
deeper reasons when she believes she already knows the answer.

“I’m afraid I was woolgathering,” he said. “Whenever I . . . feel especially
sorry for you. I’m afraid I think of you as . . . well, Jessica.”

“Sorry for me? Whatever for?”

Yueh shrugged. Long ago, he had realized Jessica was not gifted with the
full Truthsay as his Wanna had been. Still, he always used the truth with
Jessica whenever possible. It was safest.

“You’ve seen this place, my . . . Jessica.” He stumbled over the name,
plunged ahead: “So barren after Caladan. And the people! Those townswomen we
passed on the way here wailing beneath their veils. The way they looked at us.”

She folded her arms across her breast, hugging herself, feeling the
crysknife there, a blade ground from a sandworm’s tooth, if the reports were
right. “It’s just that we’re strange to them–different people, different
customs. They’ve known only the Harkonnens.” She looked past him out the
windows. “What were you staring at out there?”

He turned back to the window. “The people.”

Jessica crossed to his side, looked to the left toward the front of the
house where Yueh’s attention was focused. A line of twenty palm trees grew
there, the ground beneath them swept clean, barren. A screen fence separated
them from the road upon which robed people were passing. Jessica detected a
faint shimmering in the air between her and the people–a house shield–and went
on to study the passing throng, wondering why Yueh found them so absorbing.

The pattern emerged and she put a hand to her cheek. The way the passing
people looked at the palm trees! She saw envy, some hate . . . even a sense of
hope. Each person raked those trees with a fixity of expression.

“Do you know what they’re thinking?” Yueh asked.

“You profess to read minds?” she asked.

“Those minds,” he said. “They look at those trees and they think; ‘There are
one hundred of us.’ That’s what they think.”

She turned a puzzled frown on him. “Why?”

“Those are date palms,” he said. “One date palm requires forty liters of
water a day. A man requires but eight liters. A palm, then, equals five men.
There are twenty palms out there–one hundred men.”

“But some of those people look at the trees hopefully.”

“They but hope some dates will fall, except it’s the wrong season.”

“We look at this place with too critical an eye,” she said. “There’s hope as
well as danger here. The spice could make us rich. With a fat treasury, we can
make this world into whatever we wish.”

And she laughed silently at herself: Who am I trying to convince? The laugh
broke through her restraints, emerging brittle, without humor. “But you can’t
buy security,” she said.

Yueh turned away to hide his face from her. If only it were possible to hate
these people instead of love them! In her manner, in many ways, Jessica was like
his Wanna. Yet that thought carried its own rigors, hardening him to his
purpose. The ways of the Harkonnen cruelty were devious. Wanna might not be
dead. He had to be certain.

“Do not worry for us, Wellington,” Jessica said. “The problem’s ours, not
yours.”

She thinks I worry for her! He blinked back tears. And I do, of course. But
I must stand before that black Baron with his deed accomplished, and take my one
chance to strike him where he is weakest–in his gloating moment!

He sighed.

“Would it disturb Paul if I looked in on him?” she asked.

“Not at all. I gave him a sedative.”

“He’s taking the change well?” she asked.
“Except for getting a bit overtired. He’s excited, but what fifteen-?year-?old
wouldn’t be under these circumstances?” He crossed to the door, opened it. “He’s
in here.”

Jessica followed, peered into a shadowy room.

Paul lay on a narrow cot, one arm beneath a light cover, the other thrown
back over his head. Slatted blinds at a window beside the bed wove a loom of
shadows across face and blanket.

Jessica stared at her son, seeing the oval shape of face so like her own.
But the hair was the Duke’s–coal-?colored and tousled. Long lashes concealed the
lime-?toned eyes. Jessica smiled, feeling her fears retreat. She was suddenly
caught by the idea of genetic traces in her son’s features–her lines in eyes
and facial outline, but sharp touches of the father peering through that outline
like maturity emerging from childhood.

She thought of the boy’s features as an exquisite distillation out of random
patterns–endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus. The thought made
her want to kneel beside the bed and take her son in her arms, but she was
inhibited by Yueh’s presence. She stepped back, closed the door softly.

Yueh had returned to the window, unable to bear watching the way Jessica
stared at her son. Why did Wanna never give me children? he asked himself. I
know as a doctor there was no physical reason against it. Was there some Bene
Gesserit reason? Was she, perhaps, instructed to serve a different purpose? What
could it have been? She loved me, certainly.

For the first time, he was caught up in the thought that he might be part of
a pattern more involuted and complicated than his mind could grasp.

Jessica stopped beside him, said: “What delicious abandon in the sleep of a
child.”

He spoke mechanically: “If only adults could relax like that.”

“Yes.”

“Where do we lose it?” he murmured.

She glanced at him, catching the odd tone, but her mind was still on Paul,
thinking of the new rigors in his training here, thinking of the differences in
his life now–so very different from the life they once had planned for him.

“We do, indeed, lose something,” she said.

She glanced out to the right at a slope humped with a wind-?troubled gray-
green of bushes–dusty leaves and dry claw branches. The too-?dark sky hung over
the slope like a blot, and the milky light of the Arrakeen sun gave the scene a
silver cast–light like the crysknife concealed in her bodice.

“The sky’s so dark,” she said.

“That’s partly the lack of moisture,” he said.

“Water!” she snapped. “Everywhere you turn here, you’re involved with the
lack of water!”

“It’s the precious mystery of Arrakis,” he said.

“Why is there so little of it? There’s volcanic rock here. There’re a dozen
power sources I could name. There’s polar ice. They say you can’t drill in the
desert–storms and sandtides destroy equipment faster than it can be installed,
if the worms don’t get you first. They’ve never found water traces there,
anyway. But the mystery, Wellington, the real mystery is the wells that’ve been
drilled up here in the sinks and basins. Have you read about those?”

“First a trickle, then nothing,” he said.

“But, Wellington, that’s the mystery. The water was there. It dries up. And
never again is there water. Yet another hole nearby produces the same result: a
trickle that stops. Has no one ever been curious about this?”

“It is curious,” he said. “You suspect some living agency? Wouldn’t that
have shown in core samples?”

“What would have shown? Alien plant matter . . . or animal? Who could
recognize it?” She turned back to the slope. “The water is stopped. Something
plugs it. That’s my suspicion.”
“Perhaps the reason’s known,” he said. “The Harkonnens sealed off many
sources of information about Arrakis. Perhaps there was reason to suppress
this.”

“What reason?” she asked. “And then there’s the atmospheric moisture. Little
enough of it, certainly, but there’s some. It’s the major source of water here,
caught in windtraps and precipitators. Where does that come from?”

“The polar caps?”

“Cold air takes up little moisture, Wellington. There are things here behind
the Harkonnen veil that bear close investigation, and not all of those things
are directly involved with the spice.”

“We are indeed behind the Harkonnen veil,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll . . . ”
He broke off, noting the sudden intense way she was looking at him. “Is
something wrong?”

“The way you say ‘Harkonnen,’ ” she said. “Even my Duke’s voice doesn’t
carry that weight of venom when he uses the hated name. I didn’t know you had
personal reasons to hate them, Wellington.”

Great Mother! he thought. I’ve aroused her suspicions! Now I must use every
trick my Wanna taught me. There’s only one solution: tell the truth as far as I
can.

He said: “You didn’t know that my wife, my Wanna . . . ” He shrugged, unable
to speak past a sudden constriction in his throat. Then: “They . . . ” The words
would not come out. He felt panic, closed his eyes tightly, experiencing the
agony in his chest and little else until a hand touched his arm gently.

“Forgive me,” Jessica said. “I did not mean to open an old wound.” And she
thought: Those animals! His wife was Bene Gesserit–the signs are all over him.
And it’s obvious the Harkonnens killed her. Here’s another poor victim bound to
the Atreides by a cherem of hate.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I’m unable to talk about it.” He opened his eyes,
giving himself up to the internal awareness of grief. That, at least, was truth.

Jessica studied him, seeing the up-?angled cheeks, the dark sequins of almond
eyes, the butter complexion, and stringy mustache hanging like a curved frame
around purpled lips and narrow chin. The creases of his cheeks and forehead, she
saw, were as much lines of sorrow as of age. A deep affection for him came over
her.

“Wellington, I’m sorry we brought you into this dangerous place,” she said.

“I came willingly,” he said. And that, too, was true.

“But this whole planet’s a Harkonnen trap. You must know that.”

“It will take more than a trap to catch the Duke Leto,” he said. And that,
too, was true.

“Perhaps I should be more confident of him,” she said. “He is a brilliant
tactician.”

“We’ve been uprooted,” he said. “That’s why we’re uneasy.”

“And how easy it is to kill the uprooted plant,” she said. “Especially when
you put it down in hostile soil.”

“Are we certain the soil’s hostile?”

“There were water riots when it was learned how many people the Duke was
adding to the population,” she said. “They stopped only when the people learned
we were installing new windtraps and condensers to take care of the load.”

“There is only so much water to support human life here,” he said. “The
people know if more come to drink a limited amount of water, the price goes up
and the very poor die. But the Duke has solved this. It doesn’t follow that the
riots mean permanent hostility toward him.”

“And guards,” she said. “Guards everywhere. And shields. You see the
blurring of them everywhere you look. We did not live this way on Caladan.”

“Give this planet a chance,” he said.

But Jessica continued to stare hard-?eyed out the window. “I can smell death
in this place,” she said. “Hawat sent advance agents in here by the battalion.
Those guards outside are his men. The cargo handlers are his men. There’ve been
unexplained withdrawals of large sums from the treasury. The amounts mean only
one thing: bribes in high places.“ She shook her head. ”Where Thufir Hawat goes,
death and deceit follow.“

”You malign him.“