“In your mood, I’m not sure we want you to stay.”
Halleck stared at the smuggler. “You doubt my word?”
“No-o-o….”
“You’ve saved me from the Harkonnens. I gave loyalty to the Duke Leto for no greater reason. I’ll stay on Arrakis—with you … or with the Fremen.”
“Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and it has power,” Tuek said. “You might find the line between life and death among the Fremen to be too sharp and quick.”
Halleck closed his eyes briefly, feeling the weariness surge up in him. “Where is the Lord who led us through the land of deserts and of pits?” he murmured.
“Move slowly and the day of your revenge will come,” Tuek said. “Speed is a device of Shaitan. Cool your sorrow—we’ve the diversions for it; three things there are that ease the heart—water, green grass, and the beauty of woman.”
Halleck opened his eyes. “I would prefer the blood of Rabban Harkonnen flowing about my feet.” He stared at Tuek. “You think that day will come?”
“I have little to do with how you’ll meet tomorrow, Gurney Halleck. I can only help you meet today.”
“Then I’ll accept that help and stay until the day you tell me to revenge your father and all the others who—”
“Listen to me, fighting man,” Tuek said. He leaned forward over his desk, his shoulders level with his ears, eyes intent. The smuggler’s face was suddenly like weathered stone. “My father’s water—I’ll buy that back myself, with my own blade.”
Halleck stared back at Tuek. In that moment, the smuggler reminded him of Duke Leto: a leader of men, courageous, secure in his own position and his own course. He was like the Duke … before Arrakis.
“Do you wish my blade beside you?” Halleck asked.
Tuek sat back, relaxed, studying Halleck silently.
“Do you think of me as fighting man?” Halleck pressed.
“You’re the only one of the Duke’s lieutenants to escape,” Tuek said. “Your enemy was overwhelming, yet you rolled with him…. You defeated him the way we defeat Arrakis.”
“Eh?”
“We live on sufferance down here, Gurney Halleck,” Tuek said. “Arrakis is our enemy.”
“One enemy at a time, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“Is that the way the Fremen make out?”
“Perhaps.”
“You said I might find life with the Fremen too tough. They live in the desert, in the open, is that why?”
“Who knows where the Fremen live? For us, the Central Plateau is a no-man’s land. But I wish to talk more about—”
“I’m told that the Guild seldom routes spice lighters in over the desert,” Halleck said. “But there are rumors that you can see bits of greenery here and there if you know where to look.”
“Rumors!” Tuek sneered. “Do you wish to choose now between me and the Fremen? We have a measure of security, our own sietch carved out of the rock, our own hidden basins. We live the lives of civilized men. The Fremen are a few ragged bands that we use as spice-hunters.”
“But they can kill Harkonnens.”
“And do you wish to know the result? Even now they are being hunted down like animals—with lasguns, because they have no shields. They are being exterminated. Why? Because they killed Harkonnens.”
“Was it Harkonnens they killed?” Halleck asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you heard that there may’ve been Sardaukar with the Harkonnens?”
“More rumors.”
“But a pogrom—that isn’t like the Harkonnens. A pogrom is wasteful.”
“I believe what I see with my own eyes,” Tuek said. “Make your choice, fighting man. Me or the Fremen. I will promise you sanctuary and a chance to draw the blood we both want. Be sure of that. The Fremen will offer you only the life of the hunted.”
Halleck hesitated, sensing wisdom and sympathy in Tuek’s words, yet troubled for no reason he could explain.
“Trust your own abilities,” Tuek said. “Whose decisions brought your force through the battle? Yours. Decide.”
“It must be,” Halleck said. “The Duke and his son are dead?”
“The Harkonnens believe it. Where such things are concerned, I incline to trust the Harkonnens.” A grim smile touched Tuek’s mouth. “But it’s about the only trust I give them.”
“Then it must be,” Halleck repeated. He held out his right hand, palm up and thumb folded flat against it in the traditional gesture. “I give you my sword.”
“Accepted.”
“Do you wish me to persuade my men?”
“You’d let them make their own decision?”
“They’ve followed me this far, but most are Caladan-born. Arrakis isn’t what they thought it’d be. Here, they’ve lost everything except their lives. I’d prefer they decided for themselves now.”
“Now is no time for you to falter,” Tuek said. “They’ve followed you this far.”
“You need them, is that it?”
“We can always use experienced fighting men … in these times more than ever.”
“You’ve accepted my sword. Do you wish me to persuade them?”
“I think they’ll follow you, Gurney Halleck.”
“’Tis to be hoped.”
“Indeed.”
“I may make my own decision in this, then?”
“Your own decision.”
Halleck pushed himself up from the bucket seat, feeling how much of his reserve strength even that small effort required. “For now, I’ll see to their quarters and well-being,” he said.
“Consult my quartermaster,” Tuek said. “Drisq is his name. Tell him it’s my wish that you receive every courtesy. I’ll join you myself presently. I’ve some off-shipments of spice to see to first.”
“Fortune passes everywhere,” Halleck said.
“Everywhere,” Tuek said. “A time of upset is a rare opportunity for our business.”
Halleck nodded, heard the faint sussuration and felt the air shift as a lockport swung open beside him. He turned, ducked through it and out of the office.
He found himself in the assembly hall through which he and his men had been led by Tuek’s aides. It was a long, fairly narrow area chewed out of the native rock, it’s smooth surface betraying the use of cutteray burners for the job. The ceiling stretched away high enough to continue the natural supporting curve of the rock and to permit internal air-convection currents. Weapons racks and lockers lined the walls.
Halleck noted with a touch of pride that those of his men still able to stand were standing—no relaxation in weariness and defeat for them. Smuggler medics were moving among them tending the wounded. Litter cases were assembled in one area down to the left, each wounded man with an Atreides companion.
The Atreides training—“We care for our own!”—it held like a core of native rock in them, Halleck noted.
One of his lieutenants stepped forward carrying Halleck’s nine-string baliset out of its case. The man snapped a salute, said: “Sir, the medics here say there’s no hope for Mattai. They have no bone and organ banks here—only outpost medicine. Mattai can’t last, they say, and he has a request of you.”
“What is it?”
The lieutenant thrust the baliset forward. “Mattai wants a song to ease his going, sir. He says you’ll know the one … he’s asked it of you often enough.” The lieutenant swallowed. “It’s the one called ‘My Woman,’ sir. If you—”
“I know.” Halleck took the baliset, flicked the multipick out of its catch on the fingerboard. He drew a soft chord from the instrument, found that someone had already tuned it. There was a burning in his eyes, but he drove that out of his thoughts as he strolled forward, strumming the tune, forcing himself to smile casually.
Several of his men and a smuggler medic were bent over one of the litters. One of the men began singing softly as Halleck approached, catching the counter-beat wi
th the ease of long familiarity:
“My woman stands at her window,
Curved lines ‘gainst square glass.
Uprais’d arms … bent … downfolded.
’Gainst sunset red and golded—
Come to me …
Come to me, warm arms of my lass.
For me …
For me, the warm arms of my lass.”
The singer stopped, reached out a bandaged arm and closed the eyelids of the man on the litter.
Halleck drew a final soft chord from the baliset, thinking: Now we are seventy-three.
***
Family life of the Royal Creche is difficult for many people to understand, but I shall try to give you a capsule view of it. My father had only one real friend, I think. That was Count Hasimir Fenring, the genetic-eunuch and one of the deadliest fighters in the Imperium. The Count, a dapper and ugly little man, brought a new slave-concubine to my father one day and I was dispatched by my mother to spy on the proceedings. All of us spied on my father as a matter of self-protection. One of the slave-concubines permitted my father under the Bene Gesserit-Guild agreement could not, of course, bear a Royal Successor, but the intrigues were constant and oppressive in their similarity. We became adept, my mother and sisters and I, at avoiding subtle instruments of death. It may seem a dreadful thing to say, but I’m not at all sure my father was innocent in all these attempts. A Royal Family is not like other families. Here was a new slave concubine, then, red-haired like my father, willowy and graceful. She had a dancer’s muscles, and her training obviously had included neuro-enticement. My father looked at her for a long time as she postured unclothed before him. Finally he said: “She is too beautiful. We will save her as a gift.” You have no idea how much consternation this restraint created in the Royal Creche. Subtlety and self-control were, after all, the most deadly threats to us all.
-“In My Father’s House” by the Princess Irulan
PAUL STOOD outside the stilltent in the late afternoon. The crevasse where he had pitched their camp lay in deep shadow. He stared out across the open sand at the distant cliff, wondering if he should waken his mother, who lay asleep in the tent.
Folds upon folds of dunes spread beyond their shelter. Away from the setting sun, the dunes exposed greased shadows so black they were like bits of night.
And the flatness.
His mind searched for something tall in that landscape. But there was no persuading tallness out of heat-addled air and that horizon—no bloom or gently shaken thing to mark the passage of a breeze … only dunes and that distant cliff beneath a sky of burnished silver-blue.
What if there isn’t one of the abandoned testing stations across there? he wondered. What if there are no Fremen, either, and the plants we see are only an accident?
Within the tent, Jessica awakened, turned onto her back and peered sidelong out the transparent end at Paul. He stood with his back to her and something about his stance reminded her of his father. She sensed the well of grief rising within her and turned away.
Presently she adjusted her stillsuit, refreshed herself with water from the tent’s catchpocket, and slipped out to stand and stretch the sleep from her muscles.
Paul spoke without turning: “I find myself enjoying the quiet here.”
How the mind gears itself for its environment, she thought. And she recalled a Bene Gesserit axiom: “The mind can go either direction under stress—towardpositive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training. ”
“It could be a good life here,” Paul said.
She tried to see the desert through his eyes, seeking to encompass all the rigors this planet accepted as commonplace, wondering at the possible futures Paul had glimpsed. One could be alone out here, she thought, without fear of someone behind you, without fear of the hunter.
She stepped past Paul, lifted her binoculars, adjusted the oil lenses and studied the escarpment across from them. Yes, saguaro in the arroyos and other spiny growth … and a matting of low grasses, yellow-green in the shadows.
“I’ll strike camp,” Paul said.
Jessica nodded, walked to the fissure’s mouth where she could get a sweep of the desert, and swung her binoculars to the left. A salt pan glared white there with a blending of dirty tan at its edges—a field of white out here where white was death. But the pan said another thing: water. At some time water had flowed across that glaring white. She lowered her binoculars, adjusted her burnoose, listened for a moment to the sound of Paul’s movements.
The sun dipped lower. Shadows stretched across the salt pan. Lines of wild color spread over the sunset horizon. Color streamed into a toe of darkness testing the sand. Coal-colored shadows spread, and the thick collapse of night blotted the desert.
Stars!
She stared up at them, sensing Paul’s movements as he came up beside her. The desert night focused upward with a feeling of lift toward the stars. The weight of the day receded. There came a brief flurry of breeze across her face.
“The first moon will be up soon,” Paul said. “The pack’s ready. I’ve planted the thumper.”
We could be lost forever in this hellplace, she thought. And no one to know.
The night wind spread sand runnels that grated across her face, bringing the smell of cinnamon: a shower of odors in the dark.
“Smell that,” Paul said.
“I can smell it even through the filter,” she said. “Riches. But will it buy water?” She pointed across the basin. “There are no artificial lights across there.”
“Fremen would be hidden in a sietch behind those rocks,” he said.
A sill of silver pushed above the horizon to their right: the first moon. It lifted into view, the hand pattern plain on its face. Jessica studied the white-silver of sand exposed in the light.
“I planted the thumper in the deepest part of the crevasse,” Paul said. “Whenever I light its candle it’ll give us about thirty minutes.”
“Thirty minutes?”
“Before it starts calling … a … worm.”
“Oh. I’m ready to go.”
He slipped away from her side and she heard his progress back up their fissure.
The night is a tunnel, she thought, a hole into tomorrow … if we’re to have a tomorrow. She shook her head. Why must I be so morbid? I was trained better than that!
Paul returned, took up the pack, led the way down to the first spreading dune where he stopped and listened as his mother came up behind him. He heard her soft progress and the cold single-grain dribbles of sound—the desert’s own code spelling out its measure of safety.
“We must walk without rhythm,” Paul said and he called up memory of men walking the sand … both prescient memory and real memory.
“Watch how I do it,” he said. “This is how Fremen walk the sand.”
He stepped out onto the windward face of the dune, following the curve of it, moved with a dragging pace.
Jessica studied his progress for ten steps, followed, imitating him. She saw the sense of it: they must sound like the natural shifting of sand … like the wind. But muscles protested this unnatural, broken pattern: Step … drag … drag … step … step … wait… drag … step …
Time stretched out around them. The rock face ahead seemed to grow no nearer. The one behind still towered high.
“Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!”
It was a drumming from the cliff behind.
“The thumper,” Paul hissed.
Its pounding continued and the found difficulty avoiding the rhythm of it in their stride.
“Lump … lump … lump … lump….”
They moved in a moonlit bowl punctured by that hollowed thumping. Down and up through spilling dunes: step … drag … wait … step…. Across pea sand that rolled under their feet: drag … wait … step….
And all the while their ears searched for a special hissing.
The sound, when it came, started so low that their own dragging passage masked it. But it grew … louder and louder … out of the west.
“Lump … lump … lump … lump….” drummed the thumper.
The hissing approach spread across the night behind them. They turned their heads as they walked, saw the mound of the coursing worm.
“Keep moving,” Paul whispered. “Don’t look back.”
A grating sound of fury exploded from the rock shadows they had left. It was a flailing avalanche of noise.
“Keep moving,” Paul repeating.
He saw that they had reached an unmarked point where the two rock faces—the one ahead and the one behind—appeared equally remote.
And still behind them, that whipping, frenzied tearing of rocks dominated the night.
They moved on and on and on…. Muscles reached a stage of mechanical aching that seemed to stretch out indefinitely, but Paul saw that the beckoning escarpment ahead of them had climbed higher.
Jessica moved in a void of concentration, aware that the pressure of her will alone kept her walking. Dryness ached in her mouth, but the sounds behind drove away all hope of stopping for a sip from her stillsuit’s catchpockets.
“Lump … lump….”
Renewed frenzy erupted from the distant cliff, drowning out the thumper.
Silence!
“Faster,” Paul whispered.
She nodded, knowing he did not see the gesture, but needing the action to tell herself that it was necessary to demand even more from muscles that already were being taxed to their limits—the unnatural movement….
The rock face of safety ahead of them climbed into the stars, and Paul saw a plane of flat sand stretching out at the base. He stepped onto it, stumbled in his fatigue, righted himself with an involuntary out-thrusting of a foot.
Resonant booming shook the sand around them.
Paul lurched sideways two steps.
“Boom! Boom!”
“Drum sand!” Jessica hissed.
Paul recovered his balance. A sweeping glance took in the sand around them, the rock escarpment perhaps two hundred meters away.
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