Road to Dune (36 page)

“You had that without begging it,” he said. A tiny smile twitched the corners of his mouth. “I beg the prerogative of your indulgence.”

She rumpled his hair, her eyes smarting with unshed tears. “Did you come here to protect me, darling?”

“Of course. My father, the Duke, has told me to protect you when he is away. I would do it anyway, but all must obey the Duke.”

“You are very right,” she said. Then: “How will we know when it is safe to leave here?”

“I told Dr. Yueh that I would find you and close a door upon us until he signaled with our knock.” Paul turned, rapped on the wall—three raps, a pause, two, then three more.

“That was sensible of you.” She turned away, clasping her hands tightly until she felt pain in her knuckles. Death traps … deadly peril for her Duke and her son and she herself sought as payment to a traitor. Which traitor? Who was the trusted lieutenant?

“If we are safe in this room, you should relax, Mother,” said Paul.

She nodded, turned a smile of false brightness on him. “What have you and Dr. Yueh been up to?”

“We’ve been looking at a filmbook about our planet. Did you know that down in the desert they have giant sandworms?”

“Yes, I read about them.”

“They’ve killed a lot of dunemen—that’s what they call the spice hunters. And they’ve swallowed whole spice factories.”

“I imagine they’re pretty horrible.”

“And they have winds here that blow six and seven hundred kilometers an hour!”

“As hard as that?”

“And it blows sand that cuts right through metal and everything. And sometimes it gets so hot it melts plastics, because of the friction.”

She gnawed at her lower lip, thinking:
What a hideous place!

Paul said: “The filmbook said this is the driest known terra … terraform planet.”

“That’s why we have to be so careful with water,” she said.

“Oh, Dr. Yueh says this house has lots of water. There’s a big tank under it.”

“But still we must be careful with water. It’s so precious here. People even pay their taxes in water.”

Paul piped up, “Dr. Yueh says there is a saying on Arrakis. ‘Polish comes from the cities, wisdom from the desert.’”

And she thought:
Leto, where are you? You’re in danger. But you know that, of course.
And she felt a moment of panic about the room around her. What if Lady Fenring’s reassurance about this room were wrong? But, no. Bene Gesserits didn’t make that kind of mistake.

“I wish I could go after the spice with my father, the Duke,” said Paul.

“He will send his men after the spice,” she said. “He won’t go himself.”

“Not even once?”

“Perhaps. But the spice desert’s much too dangerous a place for a boy.”

“I’m almost twelve.”

“I know, darling, but men need years of special training before they go out on the sand.”

“I could learn.”

“Maybe when you grow up.”

“I’ll study. Will you tell Dr. Yueh to get me all the books there are about our planet? I want books even about the time before they found the spice.”

“We’ll get all we can find,” she said.

“Until Dr. Yueh showed me the filmbook I thought we’d always had the spice,” he said.

She smiled in spite of her fears. “Only for about a hundred years.” And then she thought:
But that is always when you’re almost-twelve.
And she remembered that there was a time in her youth when enthusiasm was less a word than a world and less a world than a universe.

Paul said: “Before they found the spice, Arrakis was just a place where they studied about plants and things that grow where it’s really dry.”

“His Imperial Majesty’s Desert Botanical Testing Station,” she said. And she wondered:
Where is Dr. Yueh? Haven’t the guards destroyed that seeker yet? And what other dangers must we face when we leave this room?

Paul pulled at his chin.

How like Leto he is when he’s serious,
she thought. And she suddenly realized that Paul was talking just to distract her, to take her mind from her worries.

“His Majesty had many creatures brought here,” said Paul. “And plants. They have a mutated form of wild buckwheat that people eat here.”

“
Eriogonum deserticole,
” she said. “That’s the botanical name for the wild buckwheat.”

He studied her face. “You know all about Arrakis, don’t you?” he said.

She looked on him fondly, warming her love of him at his effort to distract her. “I know some things about our new home. They brought the plants and animals here to condition this place for humans. Most of the new ones came from Earth. The dry climate plants are called erophytes. I have a filmbook about useful xerophytes. I’ll see that Dr. Yueh has it for you tomorrow.”

Still, he studied her face. “Don’t worry, mother. The guards will take care of the dangers outside. Pretty soon they will come for us. I’ll protect you until then.”

She put an arm around his shoulder, turned to the tall reach of filter glass that faced the southwest. Out there, the sun of Arrakis had moved well on toward sunset.

Paul put his hand over hers on his shoulder.

ESCAPE FROM THE HARKONNENS: WITH DUNCAN AND LIET-KYNES AT THE DESERT BASE

(Paul and Jessica’s first sanctuary, after the fall of Arrakeen)

J
essica stepped over the doorsill into a windowless laboratory.

Paul followed his mother, glanced back at the ornicopter his mother had commandeered to bring them. How peremptory she had been to the Duke’s guard! He knew she’d used the Voice, and already he was beginning to think in Bene Gesserit terms.

Jessica studied the long room in which they found themselves. It was a civil place full of angles and squares. The room contained about a dozen people in green smocks. Most of them were working at a long bench along one wall—watching dials, fiddling with instruments. There was the smell of ozone, and semi-muted sounds that suggested furious activity: machine coughs, the horse-whinnies of spinning belts and multidrives. She saw cages with small animals in them stacked against an end wall.

“Dr. Kynes?” she said.

A figure at the bench turned. He was a thin man (
like most of the dehydrated pods we’ve seen on this planet,
she thought).

“I am Dr. Kynes,” he said. He spoke with a clipped-off precision, and looked that kind of man. Jessica immediately catalogued him as one whose words could be expected to come out razor apt, rasping off any fuzzy edges of meaning.

Good,
she thought.
That kind are generally honest.

“I am Lady Jessica and …” She indicated Paul, “ … this is my son, Paul, the ducal heir.”

Momentary tenseness showed in a tightening of Dr. Kynes’ jawline. The others turned from the bench, caution in their movements. Machine sounds 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.

“We are honored, Noble Born,” said Kynes.

Noble Born! They all make that mistake,
Jessica thought.
Ah, well, let it pass.

“You seem very busy here,” she said.

“What is this place, Mother?” Paul asked. He stared around him at the people who still watched dials, adjusted instruments. It reminded him somewhat of Dr. Yueh’s laboratory, but there was more equipment to this place.

“Visits of royalty are uncommon here,” Kynes said. “We were … unprepared. Please forgive the …”

“I thought this place had been abandoned,” she said. “Isn’t this one of the old desert biological stations? I saw it on the Duke’s chart. I thought this was the place he was supposed to visit tomorrow.”

Kynes flicked a glance back to the bench, wet his lips with his tongue, returned his attention to her.

“No one told us you were coming,” he said. “The …” He shrugged.

Jessica glanced once more around the room, recognizing the activity now for what it was: they’d been cleaning up some sort of last minute tests or work of that sort! They’d been preparing to pull all this out of here in a preparation for Leto’s visit!

Paul tugged at her arm. “May I go look at the animals down there in the cages?”

She looked at Kynes.

“Oh, they’re quite safe,” Kynes said. “Just don’t stick your fingers in the cages. Some of the kangaroo rats will bite.”

“You will stay beside me, Paul,” she said. She recognized the planetologist’s uneasiness. She stared at him, allowing his nervousness to grow. “I like to see things the way they really are,” Jessica said. “That’s one reason I sometimes arrive unannounced.”

Kynes’ face darkened. He glanced out the open door at the ornicopter, the two men standing beside it.

And Jessica realized another thing: Kynes had been expecting someone to arrive. Otherwise he’d have made more of a stir about the’copter. His own transport probably, or more of his workers. She allowed a cold smile to pass over her face, looked out the door.

“Idaho!” she called. “Come here, please.”

She saw Idaho speak to the native pilot, then advance across the sand, through the door. He looked very impressive with his chest shield and currassier weapons. His attitude toward Jessica betrayed extreme deference. He was extending himself in good behavior, fighting the shame of his drunkenness.

“Idaho,” she said, “there’s something unusual going on here. Keep a careful watch on these people. The Duke will want to know about this.”

Idaho swept a hard glance around the room. He was the trained killer letting the people here know he could smash them and they couldn’t so much as scratch him. “Yes, My Lady,” he said.

Kynes swallowed. “My Lady, you don’t understand. This is …”

“Yes,” she said. “What is this?”

Paul looked up at Duncan Idaho, tried to imitate Idaho’s hard glance around the room. His own body shield was in full force. He could feel the faint tingling around his forehead where the field was strongest.

“My Duke is very generous to those of his subjects who are truthful and honorable with him,” she said. “He is otherwise, I assure you, with people who lie to him or attempt to cheat him.”

Kynes chewed his lower lip, tried to explain some of his dignity. “My Lady, in all due respect, but this station is still part of the Emperor’s reg …”

“And the Emperor has been told, I’m sure, that this station was abandoned,” she snapped. “Don’t play games with me!”

She sniffed and detected cinnamon! It was so faint behind the ozone odor that only her trained senses caught it. The spice! They were doing something here that concerned the spice! And the ozone was meant to kill the smell. Now, with her senses at full alert, she gestalted the place. She knew she’d be able to sort out the impressions later, get an accurate line on their experiments.

“Really, My Lady,” Kynes said. “We’re all simple subjects of …”

“You have been experimenting with the spice,” she accused.

Kynes and his workers froze, staring at her. Their fear was so thick it was like a palpable substance in the room.

Jessica relaxed, smiled. “The Harkonnens forbade it, certainly,” she said. “But don’t any of you simpletons realize my Duke is not a Harkonnen, that he might have other ideas about such research?”

She saw the first dawning hope in Kynes’ eyes, glanced at Idaho. “You can relax, Idaho. We’ve just run into a symptom of the Harkonnen disease. They haven’t had the Atreides antidote yet.”

Paul looked at his mother, back to Kynes. How had she known about the spice? It must be her special training, he realized. But how? The knowledge that she could do such a thing as this and that he might learn how to do it firmed his resolution.
I will learn,
he told himself.

Kynes said, “But …”

“Don’t try to make excuses,” she said. “We’re familiar with what happens in a Harkonnen fief.” She glanced at the workbench, pulling one fact from the gestalt impression, and she thought:
Let them think we’re omnipotent.
She said: “You’ve been tracing the bifurcation of the phenol chain. Good. Tell your people to go on with their work. The Duke will want a full report on your progress.”

Kynes sagged. Every line of his face betrayed submission. If she even knew the direction of their research …

“Tell your people,” Jessica repeated. “My Duke rewards this sort of activity … especially if it’s successful. And one thing more: You can discard your ideas about abandoning this place. It appears to be an excellent site for such work. It’s near the spice sands. It’s a place where you won’t get casual visitors …” She smiled. “We’re not casual visitors.”

Chuckles came slowly around the room, they told her much.
The way a person laughs shows you where his tensions are,
went a Bene Gesserit axiom. One of the men in the room had only seemed to chuckle. She marked him for later investigation, said: “Is there somewhere we may talk without disturbing your workers or being disturbed ourselves, Doctor?”

Kynes hesitated, inclined his head. “My office, Noble Born.” He gestured toward a door at the end opposite the animal cages.

“Paul, you stay with Idaho,” Jessica said. “I won’t be long. You may look at those animals if you wish, but mind the Doctor’s warning. Some of those creatures bite.”

No need telling them to wear shields at all times, she thought. She gave Idaho the casual hand signal that told him to disregard her order to relax, for him to remain on alert. Idaho blinked acknowledgement. And she noted as she accompanied Kynes toward the door to his office that one of the workers crossed the room, closed the outside door. The worker was the one with the non-chuckle.

Kynes’ office was square, about eight meters to a side. Curry-colored walls were broken by a single line of reel-files and a portable scanner screen. There were no windows. Almost in the center of the room sat a squat desk with a milk-glass top shot full of yellow bubbles. Four suspensor-field chairs ringed the desk. There were papers on the desk held down by a small block of sand-etched marble.

Where did they expect to hide all this stuff?
she wondered. It was a wedge-shaped building driven into a cliff. Then she realized that this room must have another exit, possibly an entire wall that swung aside. She’d noted when they were coming down in the’copter that the structure squatted against a cliff.
A cave in the cliff!
she thought.
How efficient.