Dune (48 page)

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 bin mange,“ Chani whispered. ”Duy punra bin 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.

= = = = = =

My father, the Padishah Emperor, was 72 yet looked no more than 35 the year he
encompassed the death of Duke Leto and gave Arrakis back to the Harkonnens. He
seldom appeared in public wearing other than a Sardaukar uniform and a Burseg’s
black helmet with the imperial lion in gold upon its crest. The uniform was an
open reminder of where his power lay. He was not always that blatant, though.
When he wanted, he could radiate charm and sincerity, but I often wonder in
these later days if anything about him was as it seemed. I think now he was a
man fighting constantly to escape the bars of an invisible cage. You must
remember that he was an emperor, father-?head of a dynasty that reached back into
the dimmest history. But we denied him a legal son. Was this not the most
terrible defeat a ruler ever suffered? My mother obeyed her Sister Superiors
where the Lady Jessica disobeyed. Which of them was the stronger? History
already has answered.
-“In My Father’s House” by the Princess Irulan

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 dewsparkle.”

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.”