Dune Messiah

by Frank Herbert

  "Give me your message," Paul said.

  Bannerjee moved to place himself where he could watch the girl's face. She seemed to notice him for the first time and her gaze went to the knife handle beneath the Security Officer's hand.

  "The innocent do not believe in evil," she said, looking squarely at Bannerjee.

  Ahhh, well done, Paul thought. It was what the real Lichna would've said. He felt a momentary pang for the real daughter of Otheym--dead now, a corpse in the sand. There was no time for such emotions, though. He scowled.

  Bannerjee kept his attention on the girl.

  "I was told to deliver my message in secret," she said.

  "Why?" Bannerjee demanded, voice harsh, probing.

  "Because it is my father's wish."

  "This is my friend," Paul said. "Am I not a Fremen? Then my friend may hear anything I hear."

  Scytale composed the girl-shape. Was this a true Fremen custom ... or was it a test?

  "The Emperor may make his own rules," Scytale said. "This is the message: My father wishes you to come to him, bringing Chani."

  "Why must I bring Chani?"

  "She is your woman and a Sayyadina. This is a Water matter, by the rules of our tribes. She must attest it that my father speaks according to the Fremen Way."

  There truly are Fremen in the conspiracy, Paul thought. This moment fitted the shape of things to come for sure. And he had no alternative but to commit himself to this course.

  "Of what will your father speak?" Paul asked.

  "He will speak of a plot against you--a plot among the Fremen."

  "Why doesn't he bring that message in person?" Bannerjee demanded.

  She kept her gaze on Paul. "My father cannot come here. The plotters suspect him. He'd not survive the journey."

  "Could he not divulge the plot to you?" Bannerjee asked. "How came he to risk his daughter on such a mission?"

  "The details are locked in a distrans carrier that only Muad'dib may open," she said. "This much I know."

  "Why not send the distrans, then?" Paul asked.

  "It is a human distrans," she said.

  "I'll go, then," Paul said. "But I'll go alone."

  "Chani must come with you!"

  "Chani is with child."

  "When has a Fremen woman refused to ..."

  "My enemies fed her a subtle poison," Paul said. "It will be a difficult birth. Her health will not permit her to accompany me now."

  Before Scytale could still them, strange emotions passed over the girl-features: frustration, anger. Scytale was reminded that every victim must have a way of escape--even such a one as Muad'dib. The conspiracy had not failed, though. This Atreides remained in the net. He was a creature who had developed firmly into one pattern. He'd destroy himself before changing into the opposite of that pattern. That had been the way with the Tleilaxu kwisatz haderach. It'd be the way with this one. And then ... the ghola.

  "Let me ask Chani to decide this," she said.

  "I have decided it," Paul said. "You will accompany me in Chani's stead."

  "It requires a Sayyadina of the Rite!"

  "Are you not Chani's friend?"

  Boxed! Scytale thought. Does he suspect? No. He's being Fremen-cautious. And the contraceptive is a fact. Well--there are other ways.

  "My father told me I was not to return," Scytale said, "that I was to seek asylum with you. He said you'd not risk me."

  Paul nodded. It was beautifully in character. He couldn't deny this asylum. She'd plead Fremen obedience to a father's command.

  "I'll take Stilgar's wife, Harah," Paul said. "You'll tell us the way to your father."

  "How do you know you can trust Stilgar's wife?"

  "I know it."

  "But I don't."

  Paul pursed his lips, then: "Does your mother live?"

  "My true mother has gone to Shai-hulud. My second mother still lives and cares for my father. Why?"

  "She's of Sietch Tabr?"

  "Yes."

  "I remember her," Paul said. "She will serve in Chani's place." He motioned to Bannerjee. "Have attendants take Otheym's Lichna to suitable quarters."

  Bannerjee nodded. Attendants. The key word meant that this messenger must be put under special guard. He took her arm. She resisted.

  "How will you go to my father?" she pleaded.

  "You'll describe the way to Bannerjee," Paul said. "He is my friend."

  "No! My father has commanded it! I cannot!"

  "Bannerjee?" Paul said.

  Bannerjee paused. Paul saw the man searching that encyclopedic memory which had helped bring him to his position of trust. "I know a guide who can take you to Otheym," Bannerjee said.

  "Then I'll go alone," Paul said.

  "Sire, if you ..."

  "Otheym wants it this way," Paul said, barely concealing the irony which consumed him.

  "Sire, it's too dangerous," Bannerjee protested.

  "Even an Emperor must accept some risks," Paul said. "The decision is made. Do as I've commanded."

  Reluctantly, Bannerjee led the Face Dancer from the room.

  Paul turned toward the blank screen behind his desk. He felt that he waited for the arrival of a rock on its blind journey from some height.

  Should he tell Bannerjee about the messenger's true nature? he wondered. No! Such an incident hadn't been written on the screen of his vision. Any deviation here carried precipitate violence. A moment of fulcrum had to be found, a place where he could will himself out of the vision.

  If such a moment existed ...

  No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/ human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals.

  --FROM THE TLEILAXU GODBUK

  As he crossed over on the high footbridge from his Keep to the A Qizarate Office Building, Paul added a limp to his walk. It was almost sunset and he walked through long shadows that helped conceal him, but sharp eyes still might detect something in his carriage that identified him. He wore a shield, but it was not activated, his aides having decided that the shimmer of it might arouse suspicions.

  Paul glanced left. Strings of sandclouds lay across the sunset like slatted shutters. The air was hiereg dry through his stillsuit filters.

  He wasn't really alone out here, but the web of Security hadn't been this loose around him since he'd ceased walking the streets alone in the night. Ornithopters with night scanners drifted far overhead in seemingly random patterns, all of them tied to his movements through a transmitter concealed in his clothing. Picked men walked the streets below. Others had fanned out through the city after seeing the Emperor in his disguise--Fremen costume down to the stillsuit and temag desert boots, the darkened features. His cheeks had been distorted with plastene inserts. A catchtube ran down along his left jaw.

  As he reached the opposite end of the bridge, Paul glanced back, noted a movement beside the stone lattice that concealed a balcony of his private quarters. Chani, no doubt. "Hunting for sand in the desert," she'd called this venture.

  How little she understood the bitter choice. Selecting among agonies, he thought, made even lesser agonies near unbearable.

  For a blurred, emotionally painful moment, he relived their parting. At the last instant, Chani had experienced a tau-glimpse of his feelings, but she had misinterpreted. She had thought his emotions were those experienced in the parting of loved ones when one entered the dangerous unknown.

  Would that I did not know, he thought.

  He had crossed the bridge now and entered the upper passageway through the office building. There were fixed glowglobes here and people hurrying on business. The Qizarate never slept. Paul found his attention caught by the signs above doorways, as though he were seeing them for the first time: Speed Merchants. Wind Stills and Retorts. Prophetic Prospects. Tests of Faith. Re
ligious Supply. Weaponry ... Propagation of the Faith ...

  A more honest label would've been Propagation of the Bureaucracy, he thought.

  A type of religious civil servant had sprung up all through his universe. This new man of the Qizarate was more often a convert. He seldom displaced a Fremen in the key posts, but he was filling all the interstices. He used melange as much to show he could afford it as for the geriatric benefits. He stood apart from his rulers--Emperor, Guild, Bene Gesserit, Landsraad, Family or Qizarate. His gods were Routine and Records. He was served by mentats and prodigious filing systems. Expediency was the first word in his catechism, although he gave proper lip-service to the precepts of the Butlerians. Machines could not be fashioned in the image of a man's mind, he said, but he betrayed by every action that he preferred machines to men, statistics to individuals, the faraway general view to the intimate personal touch requiring imagination and initiative.

  As Paul emerged onto the ramp at the far side of the building, he heard the bells calling the Evening Rite at Alia's Fane.

  There was an odd feeling of permanence about the bells.

  The temple across the thronged square was new, its rituals of recent devising, but there was something about this setting in a desert sink at the edge of Arrakeen--something in the way wind-driven sand had begun to weather stones and plastene, something in the haphazard way buildings had gone up around the Fane. Everything conspired to produce the impression that this was a very old place full of traditions and mystery.

  He was down into the press of people now--committed. The only guide his Security force could find had insisted it be done this way. Security hadn't liked Paul's ready agreement. Stilgar had liked it even less. And Chani had objected most of all.

  The crowd around him, even while its members brushed against him, glanced his way unseeing and passed on, gave him a curious freedom of movement. It was the way they'd been conditioned to treat a Fremen, he knew. He carried himself like a man of the inner desert. Such men were quick to anger.

  As he moved into the quickening flow to the temple steps, the crush of people became even greater. Those all around could not help but press against him now, but he found himself the target for ritual apologies: "Your pardon, noble sir. I cannot prevent this discourtesy." "Pardon, sir; this crush of people is the worst I've ever seen." "I abase myself, holy citizen. A lout shoved me."

  Paul ignored the words after the first few. There was no feeling in them except a kind of ritual fear. He found himself, instead, thinking that he had come a long way from his boyhood days in Caladan Castle. Where had he put his foot on the path that led to this journey across a crowded square on a planet so far from Caladan? Had he really put his foot on a path? He could not say he had acted at any point in his life for one specific reason. The motives and impinging forces had been complex--more complex possibly than any other set of goads in human history. He had the heady feeling here that he might still avoid the fate he could see so clearly along this path. But the crowd pushed him forward and he experienced the dizzy sense that he had lost his way, lost personal direction over his life.

  The crowd flowed with him up the steps now into the temple portico. Voices grew hushed. The smell of fear grew stronger--acrid, sweaty.

  Acolytes had already begun the service within the temple. Their plain chant dominated the other sounds--whispers, rustle of garments, shuffling feet, coughs--telling the story of the Far Places visited by the Priestess in her holy trance.

  She rides the sandworm of space!

  She guides through all storms

  Into the land of gentle winds.

  Though we sleep by the snake's den,

  She guards our dreaming souls.

  Shunning the desert heat,

  She hides us in a cool hollow.

  The gleaming of her white teeth

  Guides us in the night.

  By the braids of her hair

  We are lifted up to heaven!

  Sweet fragrance, flower-scented,

  Surrounds us in her presence.

  Balak! Paul thought, thinking in Fremen. Look out! She can be filled with angry passion, too.

  The temple portico was lined with tall, slender glow-tubes simulating candle flame. They flickered. The flickering stirred ancestral memories in Paul even while he knew that was the intent. This setting was an atavism, subtly contrived, effective. He hated his own hand in it.

  The crowd flowed with him through tall metal doors into the gigantic nave, a gloomy place with the flickering lights far away overhead, a brilliantly illuminated altar at the far end. Behind the altar, a deceptively simple affair of black wood encrusted with sand patterns from the Fremen mythology, hidden lights played on the field of a pru-door to create a rainbow borealis. The seven rows of chanting acolytes ranked below that spectral curtain took on an eerie quality: black robes, white faces, mouths moving in unison.

  Paul studied the pilgrims around him, suddenly envious of their in tentness, their air of listening to truths he could not hear. It seemed to him that they gained something here which was denied to him, something mysteriously healing.

  He tried to inch his way closer to the altar, was stopped by a hand on his arm. Paul whipped his gaze around, met the probing stare of an ancient Fremen--blue-blue eyes beneath overhanging brows, recognition in them. A name flashed into Paul's mind: Rasir, a companion from the sietch days.

  In the press of the crowd, Paul knew he was completely vulnerable if Rasir planned violence.

  The old man pressed close, one hand beneath a sand-grimed robe--grasping the hilt of a crysknife, no doubt. Paul set himself as best he could to resist attack. The old man moved his head toward Paul's ear, whispered: "We will go with the others."

  It was the signal to identify his guide. Paul nodded.

  Rasir drew back, faced the altar.

  "She comes from the east," the acolytes chanted. "The sun stands at her back. All things are exposed. In the full glare of light--her eyes miss no thing, neither light nor dark."

  A wailing rebaba jarred across the voices, stilled them, receded into silence. With an electric abruptness, the crowd surged forward several meters. They were packed into a tight mass of flesh now, the air heavy with their breathing and the scent of spice.

  "Shai-hulud writes on clean sand!" the acolytes shouted.

  Paul felt his own breath catch in unison with those around him. A feminine chorus began singing faintly from the shadows behind the shimmering pru-door: "Alia ... Alia ... Alia ..." It grew louder and louder, fell to a sudden silence.

  Again--voices beginning vesper-soft: She stills all storms--

  Her eyes kill our enemies,

  And torment the unbelievers.

  From the spires of Tuono

  Where dawnlight strikes

  And clear water runs,

  You see her shadow.

  In the shining summer heat

  She serves us bread and milk--

  Cool, fragrant with spices.

  Her eyes melt our enemies,

  Torment our oppressors

  And pierce all mysteries.

  She is Alia ... Alia ... Alia ...

  Slowly, the voices trailed off.

  Paul felt sickened. What are we doing? he asked himself. Alia was a child witch, but she was growing older. And he thought: Growing older is to grow more wicked.

  The collective mental atmosphere of the temple ate at his psyche. He could sense that element of himself which was one with those all around him, but the differences formed a deadly contradiction. He stood immersed, isolated in a personal sin which he could never expiate. The immensity of the universe outside the temple flooded his awareness. How could one man, one ritual, hope to knit such immensity into a garment fitted to all men?

  Paul shuddered.

  The universe opposed him at every step. It eluded his grasp, conceived countless disguises to delude him. That universe would never agree with any shape he gave it.

  A profound hush spread
through the temple.

  Alia emerged from the darkness behind the shimmering rainbows. She wore a yellow robe trimmed in Atreides green--yellow for sunlight, green for the death which produced life. Paul experienced the sudden surprising thought that Alia had emerged here just for him, for him alone. He stared across the mob in the temple at his sister. She was his sister. He knew her ritual and its roots, but he had never before stood out here with the pilgrims, watched her through their eyes. Here, performing the mystery of this place, he saw that she partook of the universe which opposed him.

  Acolytes brought her a golden chalice.

  Alia raised the chalice.

  With part of his awareness, Paul knew that the chalice contained the unaltered melange, the subtle poison, her sacrament of the oracle.

  Her gaze on the chalice, Alia spoke. Her voice caressed the ears, flower sound, flowing and musical: "In the beginning, we were empty," she said.

  "Ignorant of all things," the chorus sang.

  "We did not know the Power that abides in every place," Alia said.

  "And in every Time," the chorus sang.

  "Here is the Power," Alia said, raising the chalice slightly.

  "It brings us joy," sang the chorus.

  And it brings us distress, Paul thought.

  "It awakens the soul," Alia said.

  "It dispels all doubts," the chorus sang.

  "In worlds, we perish," Alia said.

  "In the Power, we survive," sang the chorus.

  Alia put the chalice to her lips, drank.

  To his astonishment, Paul found he was holding his breath like the meanest pilgrim of this mob. Despite every shred of personal knowledge about the experience Alia was undergoing, he had been caught in the tao-web. He felt himself remembering how that fiery poison coursed into the body. Memory unfolded the time-stopping when awareness became a mote which changed the poison. He reexperi enced the awakening into timelessness where all things were possible. He knew Alia's present experience, yet he saw now that he did not know it. Mystery blinded the eyes.

  Alia trembled, sank to her knees.