Dune (2 page)

“The Harkonnens? Bless us, no! Now, be silent.” A dry finger touched his
neck and he stilled the involuntary urge to leap away.

“Good,” she said. “You pass the first test. Now, here’s the way of the rest
of it: If you withdraw your hand from the box you die. This is the only rule.
Keep your hand in the box and live. Withdraw it and die.”

Paul took a deep breath to still his trembling. “If I call out there’ll be
servants on you in seconds and you’ll die.”

“Servants will not pass your mother who stands guard outside that door.
Depend on it. Your mother survived this test. Now it’s your turn. Be honored. We
seldom administer this to men-?children.”

Curiosity reduced Paul’s fear to a manageable level. He heard truth in the
old woman’s voice, no denying it. If his mother stood guard out there . . . if
this were truly a test . . . And whatever it was, he knew himself caught in it,
trapped by that hand at his neck: the gom jabbar. He recalled the response from
the Litany against Fear as his mother had taught him out of the Bene Gesserit
rite.

“I must not fear. 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 I will turn the inner eye to see its
path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

He felt calmness return, said: “Get on with it, old woman.”

“Old woman!” she snapped. “You’ve courage, and that can’t be denied. Well,
we shall see, sirra.” She bent close, lowered her voice almost to a whisper.
“You will feel pain in this hand within the box. Pain. But! Withdraw the hand
and I’ll touch your neck with my gom jabbar — the death so swift it’s like the
fall of the headsman’s axe. Withdraw your hand and the gom jabbar takes you.
Understand?”

“What’s in the box?”

“Pain.”

He felt increased tingling in his hand, pressed his lips tightly together.
How could this be a test? he wondered. The tingling became an itch.

The old woman said; “You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a
trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure
the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to
his kind.”

The itch became the faintest burning. “Why are you doing this?” he demanded.

“To determine if you’re human. Be silent.”

Paul clenched his left hand into a fist as the burning sensation increased
in the other hand. It mounted slowly: heat upon heat upon heat . . . upon heat.
He felt the fingernails of his free hand biting the palm. He tried to flex the
fingers of the burning hand, but couldn’t move them.

“It burns,” he whispered.

“Silence!”

Pain throbbed up his arm. Sweat stood out on his forehead. Every fiber cried
out to withdraw the hand from that burning pit . . . but . . . the gom jabbar.
Without turning his head, he tried to move his eyes to see that terrible needle
poised beside his neck. He sensed that he was breathing in gasps, tried to slow
his breaths and couldn’t.

Pain!

His world emptied of everything except that hand immersed in agony, the
ancient face inches away staring at him.

His lips were so dry he had difficulty separating them.

The burning! The burning!

He thought he could feel skin curling black on that agonized hand, the flesh
crisping and dropping away until only charred bones remained.
It stopped!

As though a switch had been turned off, the pain stopped.

Paul felt his right arm trembling, felt sweat bathing his body.

“Enough,” the old woman muttered. “Kull wahad! No woman child ever withstood
that much. I must’ve wanted you to fail.” She leaned back, withdrawing the gom
jabbar from the side of his neck. “Take your hand from the box, young human, and
look at it.”

He fought down an aching shiver, stared at the lightless void where his hand
seemed to remain of its own volition. Memory of pain inhibited every movement.
Reason told him he would withdraw a blackened stump from that box.

“Do it!” she snapped.

He jerked his hand from the box, stared at it astonished. Not a mark. No
sign of agony on the flesh. He held up the hand, turned it, flexed the fingers.

“Pain by nerve induction,” she said. “Can’t go around maiming potential
humans. There’re those who’d give a pretty for the secret of this box, though.”
She slipped it into the folds of her gown.

“But the pain –” he said.

“Pain,” she sniffed. “A human can override any nerve in the body.”

Paul felt his left hand aching, uncurled the clenched fingers, looked at
four bloody marks where fingernails had bitten his palm. He dropped the hand to
his side, looked at the old woman. “You did that to my mother once?”

“Ever sift sand through a screen?” she asked.

The tangential slash of her question shocked his mind into a higher
awareness: Sand through a screen, he nodded.

“We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”

He lifted his right hand, willing the memory of the pain. “And that’s all
there is to it — pain?”

“I observed you in pain, lad. Pain’s merely the axis of the test. Your
mother’s told you about our ways of observing. I see the signs of her teaching
in you. Our test is crisis and observation.”

He heard the confirmation in her voice, said: “It’s truth!”

She stared at him. He senses truth! Could he be the one? Could he truly be
the one? She extinguished the excitement, reminding herself: “Hope clouds
observation.”

“You know when people believe what they say,” she said.

“I know it.”

The harmonics of ability confirmed by repeated test were in his voice. She
heard them, said: “Perhaps you are the Kwisatz Haderach. Sit down, little
brother, here at my feet.”

“I prefer to stand.”

“Your mother sat at my feet once.”

“I’m not my mother.”

“You hate us a little, eh?” She looked toward the door, called out:
“Jessica!”

The door flew open and Jessica stood there staring hard-?eyed into the room.
Hardness melted from her as she saw Paul. She managed a faint smile.

“Jessica, have you ever stopped hating me?” the old woman asked.

“I both love and hate you,” Jessica said. “The hate — that’s from pains I
must never forget. The love — that’s . . . ”

“Just the basic fact,” the old woman said, but her voice was gentle. “You
may come in now, but remain silent. Close that door and mind it that no one
interrupts us.”

Jessica stepped into the room, closed the door and stood with her back to
it. My son lives, she thought. My son lives and is . . . human. I knew he was .
. . but . . . he lives. Now, I can go on living. The door felt hard and real
against her back. Everything in the room was immediate and pressing against her
senses.
My son lives.

Paul looked at his mother. She told the truth. He wanted to get away alone
and think this experience through, but knew he could not leave until he was
dismissed. The old woman had gained a power over him. They spoke truth. His
mother had undergone this test. There must be terrible purpose in it . . . the
pain and fear had been terrible. He understood terrible purposes. They drove
against all odds. They were their own necessity. Paul felt that he had been
infected with terrible purpose. He did not know yet what the terrible purpose
was.

“Some day, lad,” the old woman said, “you, too, may have to stand outside a
door like that. It takes a measure of doing.”

Paul looked down at the hand that had known pain, then up to the Reverend
Mother. The sound of her voice had contained a difference then from any other
voice in his experience. The words were outlined in brilliance. There was an
edge to them. He felt that any question he might ask her would bring an answer
that could lift him out of his flesh-?world into something greater.

“Why do you test for humans?” he asked.

“To set you free.”

“Free?”

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would
set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

“ ‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’ ” Paul
quoted.

“Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible,” she said.
“But what the O.C. Bible should’ve said is: ‘Thou shalt not make a machine to
counterfeit a human mind.’ Have you studied the Mentat in your service?”

“I’ve studied with Thufir Hawat.”

“The Great Revolt took away a crutch,” she said. “It forced human minds to
develop. Schools were started to train human talents. ”

“Bene Gesserit schools?”

She nodded. “We have two chief survivors of those ancient schools: the Bene
Gesserit and the Spacing Guild. The Guild, so we think, emphasizes almost pure
mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs another function.”

“Politics,” he said.

“Kull wahad!” the old woman said. She sent a hard glance at Jessica.

“I’ve not told him. Your Reverence,” Jessica said.

The Reverend Mother returned her attention to Paul. “You did that on
remarkably few clues,” she said. “Politics indeed. The original Bene Gesserit
school was directed by those who saw the need of a thread of continuity in human
affairs. They saw there could be no such continuity without separating human
stock from animal stock — for breeding purposes.”

The old woman’s words abruptly lost their special sharpness for Paul. He
felt an offense against what his mother called his instinct for rightness. It
wasn’t that Reverend Mother lied to him. She obviously believed what she said.
It was something deeper, something tied to his terrible purpose.

He said: “But my mother tells me many Bene Gesserit of the schools don’t
know their ancestry.”

“The genetic lines are always in our records,” she said. “Your mother knows
that either she’s of Bene Gesserit descent or her stock was acceptable in
itself.”

“Then why couldn’t she know who her parents are?”

“Some do . . . Many don’t. We might, for example, have wanted to breed her
to a close relative to set up a dominant in some genetic trait. We have many
reasons.”

Again, Paul felt the offense against rightness. He said: “You take a lot on
yourselves.”
The Reverend Mother stared at him, wondering: Did I hear criticism in his
voice? “We carry a heavy burden,” she said.

Paul felt himself coming more and more out of the shock of the test. He
leveled a measuring stare at her, said: “You say maybe I’m the . . . Kwisatz
Haderach. What’s that, a human gom jabbar?”

“Paul,” Jessica said. “You mustn’t take that tone with –”

“I’ll handle this, Jessica,” the old woman said. “Now, lad, do you know
about the Truthsayer drug?”

“You take it to improve your ability to detect falsehood,” he said. “My
mother’s told me.”

“Have you ever seen truthtrance?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“The drug’s dangerous,” she said, “but it gives insight. When a Truthsayer’s
gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory — in her body’s
memory. We look down so many avenues of the past . . . but only feminine
avenues.” Her voice took on a note of sadness. “Yet, there’s a place where no
Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will
come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where
we cannot — into both feminine and masculine pasts.”

“Your Kwisatz Haderach?”

“Yes, the one who can be many places at once: the Kwisatz Haderach. Many men
have tried the drug . . . so many, but none has succeeded.”

“They tried and failed, all of them?”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “They tried and died.”

= = = = = =

To attempt an understanding of Muad’Dib without understanding his mortal
enemies, the Harkonnens, is to attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood.
It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing Darkness. It cannot be.
-from “Manual of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan

It was a relief globe of a world, partly in shadows, spinning under the
impetus of a fat hand that glittered with rings. The globe sat on a freeform
stand at one wall of a windowless room whose other walls presented a patchwork
of multicolored scrolls, filmbooks, tapes and reels. Light glowed in the room
from golden balls hanging in mobile suspensor fields.

An ellipsoid desk with a top of jade-?pink petrified elacca wood stood at the
center of the room. Veriform suspensor chairs ringed it, two of them occupied.
In one sat a dark-?haired youth of about sixteen years, round of face and with
sullen eyes. The other held a slender, short man with effeminate face.

Both youth and man stared at the globe and the man half-?hidden in shadows
spinning it.

A chuckle sounded beside the globe. A basso voice rumbled out of the
chuckle: “There it is, Piter — the biggest mantrap in all history. And the
Duke’s headed into its jaws. Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron
Vladimir Harkonnen, do?”

“Assuredly, Baron,” said the man. His voice came out tenor with a sweet,
musical quality.

The fat hand descended onto the globe, stopped the spinning. Now, all eyes
in the room could focus on the motionless surface and see that it was the kind
of globe made for wealthy collectors or planetary governors of the Empire. It
had the stamp of Imperial handicraft about it. Latitude and longitude lines were
laid in with hair-?fine platinum wire. The polar caps were insets of finest
cloud-?milk diamonds.

The fat hand moved, tracing details on the surface. “I invite you to
observe,” the basso voice rumbled. “Observe closely, Piter, and you, too, Feyd-
Rautha, my darling: from sixty degrees north to seventy degrees south — these
exquisite ripples. Their coloring: does it not remind you of sweet caramels? And
nowhere do you see blue of lakes or rivers or seas. And these lovely polar caps
– so small. Could anyone mistake this place? Arrakis! Truly unique. A superb
setting for a unique Victory.“