Sounds returned to him … and reason. He heard someone shouting orders—gas masks … keep a door closed … get blowers going.
The others fell quickly, he thought. I’m still standing. I’m still breathing. Merciless hell! That was close!
He could analyze it now. His shield had been activated, set low but still enough to slow molecular interchange across the field barrier. And he had been pushing himself away from the table … that and Piter’s shocked gasp which had brought the guard captain darting forward into his own doom.
Chance and the warning in a dying man’s gasp—these had saved him.
The Baron felt no gratitude to Piter. The fool had got himself killed. And that stupid guard captain! He’d said he scoped everyone before bringing them into the Baron’s presence! How had it been possible for the Duke … ? No warning. Not even from the poison snooper over the table—until it was too late. How?
Well, no matter now, the Baron thought, his mind firming. The next guard captain will begin by finding answers to these questions.
He grew aware of more activity down the hall—around the corner at the other door to that room of death. The Baron pushed himself away from his own door, studied the lackeys around him. They stood there staring, silent, waiting for the Baron’s reaction.
Would the Baron be angry?
And the Baron realized only a few seconds had passed since his flight from that terrible room.
Some of the guards had weapons leveled at the door. Some were directing their ferocity toward the empty hall that stretched away toward the noises around the corner to their right.
A man came striding around that corner, gas mask dangling by its straps at his neck, his eyes intent on the overhead poison snoopers that lined this corridor. He was yellow-haired, flat of face with green eyes. Crisp lines radiated from his thick-lipped mouth. He looked like some water creature misplaced among those who walked the land.
The Baron stared at the approaching man, recalling the name: Nefud. Iakin Nefud. Guard corporal. Nefud was addicted to semuta, the drug-music combination that played itself in the deepest consciousness. A useful item of information, that.
The man stopped in front of the Baron, saluted. “Corridor’s clear, m’Lord. I was outside watching and saw that it must be poison gas. Ventilators in your room were pulling air in from these corridors.” He glanced up at the snooper over the Baron’s head. “None of the stuff escaped. We have the room cleaned out now. What are your orders?”
The Baron recognized the man’s voice—the one who’d been shouting orders. Efficient, this corporal, he thought.
“They’re all dead in there?” the Baron asked.
“Yes, m’Lord.”
Well, we must adjust, the Baron thought.
“First,” he said, “let me congratulate you, Nefud. You’re the new captain of my guard. And I hope you’ll take to heart the lesson to be learned from the fate of your predecessor.”
The Baron watched the awareness grow in his newly promoted guardsman. Nefud knew he’d never again be without his semuta.
Nefud nodded. “My Lord knows I’ll devote myself entirely to his safety.”
“Yes. Well, to business. I suspect the Duke had something in his mouth. You will find out what that something was, how it was used, who helped him put it there. You’ll take every precaution—”
He broke off, his chain of thought shattered by a disturbance in the corridor behind him—guards at the door to the lift from the lower levels of the frigate trying to hold back a tall colonel bashar who had just emerged from the lift.
The Baron couldn’t place the colonel bashar’s face: thin with mouth like a slash in leather, twin ink spots for eyes.
“Get your hands off me, you pack of carrion-eaters!” the man roared, and he dashed the guards aside.
Ah-h-h, one of the Sardaukar, the Baron thought.
The colonel bashar came striding toward the Baron, whose eyes went to slits of apprehension. The Sardaukar officers filled him with unease. They all seemed to look like relatives of the Duke … the late Duke. And their manners with the Baron!
The colonel bashar planted himself half a pace in front of the Baron, hands on hips. The guard hovered behind him in twitching uncertainty.
The Baron noted the absence of salute, the disdain in the Sardaukar’s manner, and his unease grew. There was only the one legion of them locally—ten brigades—reinforcing the Harkonnen legions, but the Baron did not fool himself. That one legion was perfectly capable of turning on the Harkonnens and overcoming them.
“Tell your men they are not to prevent me from seeing you, Baron,” the Sardaukar growled. “My men brought you the Atreides Duke before I could discuss his fate with you. We will discuss it now.”
I must not lose face before my men, the Baron thought.
“So?” It was a coldly controlled word, and the Baron felt proud of it.
“My Emperor has charged me to make certain his royal cousin dies cleanly without agony,” the colonel bashar said.
“Such were the Imperial orders to me,” the Baron lied. “Did you think I’d disobey?”
“I’m to report to my Emperor what I see with my own eyes,” the Sardaukar said.
“The Duke’s already dead,” the Baron snapped, and he waved a hand to dismiss the fellow.
The colonel bashar remained planted facing the Baron. Not by flicker of eye or muscle did he acknowledge he had been dismissed. “How?” he growled.
Really! the Baron thought. This is too much.
“By his own hand, if you must know,” the Baron said. “He took poison.”
“I will see the body now,” the colonel Bashar said.
The Baron raised his gaze to the ceiling in feigned exasperation while his thoughts raced. Damnation! This sharp-eyed Sardaukar will see the room before a thing’s been changed!
“Now,” the Sardaukar growled. “I’ll see it with my own eyes.”
There was no preventing it, the Baron realized. The Sardaukar would see all. He’d know the Duke had killed Harkonnen men … that the Baron most likely had escaped by a narrow margin. There was the evidence of the dinner remnants on the table, and the dead Duke across from it with destruction around him.
No preventing it at all.
“I’ll not be put off,” the colonel bashar snarled.
“You’re not being put off,” the Baron said, and he stared into the Sardaukar’s obsidian eyes. “I hide nothing from my Emperor.” He nodded to Nefud. “The colonel bashar is to see everything, at once. Take him in by the door where you stood, Nefud.”
“This way, sir,” Nefud said.
Slowly, insolently, the Sardaukar moved around the Baron, shouldered a way through the guardsmen.
Insufferable, the Baron thought. Now, the Emperor will know how I slipped up. He’ll recognize it as a sign of weakness.
And it was agonizing to realize that the Emperor and his Sardaukar were alike in their disdain for weakness. The Baron chewed at his lower lip, consoling himself that the Emperor, at least, had not learned of the Atreides raid on Giedi Prime, the destruction of the Harkonnen spice stores there.
Damn that slippery Duke!
The Baron watched the retreating backs—the arrogant Sardaukar and the stocky, efficient Nefud.
We must adjust, the Baron thought. I’ll have to put Rabban over this damnable planet once more. Without restraint. I must spend my own Harkonnen blood to put Arrakis into a proper condition for accepting Feyd-Rautha. Damn that Piter! He would get himself killed before I was through with him.
The Baron sighed.
And I must send at once to Tleielax for a new Mentat. They undoubtedly have the new one ready for me by now.
One of the guardsmen beside him coughed.
The Baron turned toward the man. “I am hungry.”
“Yes, m’Lord.”
“And I wish to be diverted while you’re clearing out that room and studying its secrets for me,” the Baron rumbled.
&n
bsp; The guardsman lowered his eyes. “What diversion does m’Lord wish?”
“I’ll be in my sleeping chambers,” the Baron said. “Bring me that young fellow we bought on Gamont, the one with the lovely eyes. Drug him well. I don’t feel like wrestling.”
“Yes, m’Lord.”
The Baron turned away, began moving with his bouncing, suspensor-buoyed pace toward his chambers. Yes, he thought. The one with the lovely eyes, the one who looks so much like the young Paul Atreides.
***
O Seas of Caladan,
O people of Duke Leto—
Citadel of Leto fallen,
Fallen forever…
—from“Songs of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
PAUL FELT that all his past, every experience before this night, had become sand curling in an hourglass. He sat near his mother hugging his knees within a small fabric and plastic hutment—a a stilltent—that had come, like the Fremen clothing they now wore, from the pack left in the ’thopter.
There was no doubt in Paul’s mind who had put the Fremkit there, who had directed the course of the ’thopter carrying them captive.
Yueh.
The traitor doctor had sent them directly into the hands of Duncan Idaho.
Paul stared out the transparent end of the stilltent at the moonshadowed rocks that ringed this place where Idaho had hidden them.
Hiding like a child when I’m now the Duke, Paul thought. He felt the thought gall him, but could not deny the wisdom in what they did.
Something had happened to his awareness this night—he saw with sharpened clarity every circumstance and occurrence around him. He felt unable to stop the inflow of data or the cold precision with which each new item was added to his knowledge and the computation was centered in his awareness. It was Mentat power and more.
Paul thought back to the moment of impotent rage as the strange ‘thopter dived out of the night onto them, stooping like a giant hawk above the desert with wind screaming through its wings. The thing in Paul’s mind had happened then. The ’thopter had skidded and slewed across a sand ridge toward the running figures—his mother and himself. Paul remembered how the smell of burned sulfur from abrasion of ’thopter skids against sand had drifted across them.
His mother, he knew, had turned, expected to meet a lasgun in the hands of Harkonnen mercenaries, and had recognized Duncan Idaho leaning out the ’thopter’s open door shouting: “Hurry! There’s wormsign south of you!”
But Paul had known as he turned who piloted the ’thopter. An accumulation of minutiae in the way it was flown, the dash of the landing—clues so small even his mother hadn’t detected them—had told Paul precisely who sat at those controls.
Across the stilltent from Paul, Jessica stirred, said: “There can be only one explanation. The Harkonnens held Yueh’s wife. He hated the Harkonnens! I cannot be wrong about that. You read his note. But why has he saved us from the carnage?”
She is only now seeing it and that poorly, Paul thought. The thought was a shock. He had known this fact as a by-the-way thing while reading the note that had accompanied the ducal signet in the pack.
“Do not try to forgive me,” Yueh had written. “I do not want your forgiveness. I already have enough burdens. What I have done was done without malice or hope of another’s understanding. It is my own tahaddi al-burhan, my ultimate test. I give you the Atreides ducal signet as token that I write truly. By the time you read this, Duke Leto will be dead. Take consolation from my assurance that he did not die alone, that one we hate above all others died with him.”
It had not been addressed or signed, but there’d been no mistaking the familiar scrawl—Yueh’s.
Remembering the letter, Paul re-experienced the distress of that moment—a thing sharp and strange that seemed to happen outside his new mental alertness. He had read that his father was dead, known the truth of the words, but had felt them as no more than another datum to be entered in his mind and used.
I loved my father, Paul thought, and knew this for truth. I should mourn him. I should feel something.
But he felt nothing except: Here’s an important fact.
It was one with all the other facts.
All the while his mind was adding sense impressions, extrapolating, computing.
Halleck’s words came back to Paul: “Mood’s a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood. ”
Perhaps that’s it, Paul thought. I’ll mourn my father later … when there’s time.
But he felt no letup in the cold precision of his being. He sensed that his new awareness was only a beginning, that it was growing. The sense of terrible purpose he’d first experienced in his ordeal with the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam pervaded him. His right hand—the hand of remembered pain—tingled and throbbed.
Is this what it is to be their Kwisatz Haderach? he wondered.
“For a while, I thought Hawat had failed us again,” Jessica said. “I thought perhaps Yueh wasn’t a Suk doctor.”
“He was everything we thought him … and more,” Paul said. And he thought: Why is she so slow seeing these things? He said, “If Idaho doesn’t get through to Kynes, we’ll be—”
“He’s not our only hope,” she said.
“Such was not my suggestion,” he said.
She heard the steel in his voice, the sense of command, and stared across the grey darkness of the stilltent at him. Paul was a silhouette against moon-frosted rocks seen through the tent’s transparent end.
“Others among your father’s men will have escaped,” she said. “We must regather them, find—”
“We will depend upon ourselves,” he said. “Our immediate concern is our family atomics. We must get them before the Harkonnens can search them out.”
“Not likely they’ll be found,” she said, “the way they were hidden.”
“It must not be left to chance.”
And she thought: Blackmail with the family atomics as a threat to the planet and its spice—that’s what he has in mind. But all he can hope for then is escape into renegade anonymity.
His mother’s words had provoked another train of thought in Paul—a duke’s concern for all the people they’d lost this night. People are the true strength of a Great House, Paul thought. And he remembered Hawat’s words: “Parting with people is a sadness; a place is only a place. ”
“They’re using Sardaukar,” Jessica said. “We must wait until the Sardaukar have been withdrawn.”
“They think us caught between the desert and the Sardaukar,” Paul said. “They intend that there be no Atreides survivors—total extermination. Do not count on any of our people escaping.”
“They cannot go on indefinitely risking exposure of the Emperor’s part in this.”
“Can’t they?”
“Some of our people are bound to escape.”
“Are they?”
Jessica turned away, frightened of the bitter strength in her son’s voice, hearing the precise assessment of chances. She sensed that his mind had leaped ahead of her, that it now saw more in some respects than she did. She had helped train the intelligence which did this, but now she found herself fearful of it. Her thoughts turned, seeking toward the lost sanctuary of her Duke, and tears burned her eyes.
This is the way it had to be, Leto, she thought. “A time of love and a time of grief. ” She rested her hand on her abdomen, awareness focused on the embryo there. I have the Atreides daughter I was ordered to produce, but the Reverend Mother was wrong: a daughter wouldn’t have saved my Leto. This child is only life reaching for the future in the midst of death. I conceived out of instinct and not out of obedience.
“Try the communinet receiver again,” Paul said.
The mind goes on working no matter how we try to hold it back, she thought.
Jessica found the tiny receiver Idaho had left for them, flipped its switch. A green light glowed on the instrument’s face. Tinny screeching came f
rom its speaker. She reduced the volume, hunted across the bands. A voice speaking Atreides battle language came into the tent.
“… back and regroup at the ridge. Fedor reports no survivors in Carthag and the Guild Bank has been sacked.”
Carthag! Jessica thought. That was a Harkonnen hotbed.
“They’re Sardaukar,” the voice said. “Watch out for Sardaukar in Atreides uniforms. They’re….”
A roaring filled the speaker, then silence.
“Try the other bands,” Paul said.
“Do you realize what that means?” Jessica asked.
“I expected it. They want the Guild to blame us for destruction of their bank. With the Guild against us, we’re trapped on Arrakis. Try the other bands.”
She weighed his words: I expected it. What had happened to him? Slowly, Jessica returned to the instrument. As she moved the bandslide, they caught glimpses of violence in the few voices calling out in Atreides battle language: “… fall back….” “… try to regroup at….” “… trapped in a cave at….”
And there was no mistaking the victorious exultation in the Harkonnen gibberish that poured from the other bands. Sharp commands, battle reports. There wasn’t enough of it for Jessica to register and break the language, but the tone was obvious.
Harkonnen victory.
Paul shook the pack beside him, hearing the two literjons of water gurgle there. He took a deep breath, looked up through the transparent end of the tent at the rock escarpment outlined against the stars. His left hand felt the sphincter-seal of the tent’s entrance. “It’ll be dawn soon,” he said. “We can wait through the day for Idaho, but not through another night. In the desert, you must travel by night and rest in shade through the day.”
Remembered lore insinuated itself into Jessica’s mind: Without a stillsuit, a man sitting in shade on the desert needs five liters of water a day to maintain body weight. She felt the slick-soft skin of the stillsuit against her body, thinking how their lives depended on these garments.
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