Children of Dune dc-3

by Frank Herbert

  “You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap. There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”

  Ghanima shook her head against the remembered pain. The burning! The burning! Paul had imagined his skin curling black on that agonized hand within the box, flesh crisping and dropping away until only charred bones remained. And it had been a trick—the hand unharmed. But sweat stood out on Ghanima’s forehead at the memory.

  “Of course you remember this in a way that I cannot,” Jessica said.

  For a moment, memory-driven, Ghanima saw her grandmother in a different light: what this woman might do out of the driving necessities of that early conditioning in the Bene Gesserit schools! It raised new questions about Jessica’s return to Arrakis.

  “It would be stupid to repeat such a test on you or your brother,” Jessica said. “You already know the way it went. I must assume you are human, that you will not misuse your inherited powers.”

  “But you don’t make that assumption at all,” Ghanima said.

  Jessica blinked, realized that the barriers had been creeping back in place, dropped them once more. She asked: “Will you believe my love for you?”

  “Yes.” Ghanima raised a hand as Jessica started to speak. “But that love wouldn’t stop you from destroying us. Oh, I know the reasoning: ‘Better the animal-human die than it re-create itself.’ And that’s especially true if the animal-human bears the name Atreides.”

  “You at least are human,” Jessica blurted. “I trust my instinct on this.”

  Ghanima saw the truth in this, said: “But you’re not sure of Leto.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Abomination?”

  Jessica could only nod.

  Ghanima said: “Not yet, at least. We both know the danger of it, though. We can see the way of it in Alia.”

  Jessica cupped her hands over her eyes, thought: Even love can’t protect us from unwanted facts. And she knew then that she still loved her daughter, crying out silently against fate: Alia! Oh, Alia! I am sorry for my part in your destruction.

  Ghanima cleared her throat loudly.

  Jessica lowered her hands, thought: I may mourn my poor daughter, but there are other necessities now. She said: “So you’ve recognized what happened to Alia.”

  “Leto and I watched it happen. We were powerless to prevent it, although we discussed many possibilities.”

  “You’re sure that your brother is free of this curse?”

  “I’m sure.”

  The quiet assurance in that statement could not be denied. Jessica found herself accepting it. Then: “How is it you’ve escaped?”

  Ghanima explained the theory upon which she and Leto had settled, that their avoiding of the spice trance while Alia entered it often made the difference. She went on to reveal his dreams and the plans they’d discussed—even Jacurutu.

  Jessica nodded. “Alia is an Atreides, though, and that poses enormous problems.”

  Ghanima fell silent before the sudden realization that Jessica still mourned her Duke as though his death had been but yesterday, that she would guard his name and memory against all threats. Personal memories from the Duke’s own lifetime fled through Ghanima’s awareness to reinforce this assessment, to soften it with understanding.

  “Now,” Jessica said, voice brisk, “what about this Preacher? I heard some disquieting reports yesterday after that damnable Lustration.”

  Ghanima shrugged. “He could be—”

  “Paul?”

  “Yes, but we haven’t seen him to examine.”

  “Javid laughs at the rumors,” Jessica said.

  Ghanima hesitated. Then: “Do you trust this Javid?”

  A grim smile touched Jessica’s lips. “No more than you do.”

  “Leto says Javid laughs at the wrong things,” Ghanima said.

  “So much for Javid’s laughter,” Jessica said. “But do you actually entertain the notion that my son is still alive, that he has returned in this guise?”

  “We say it’s possible. And Leto …” Ghanima found her mouth suddenly dry, remembered fears clutching her breast. She forced herself to overcome them, recounted Leto’s other revelations of prescient dreams.

  Jessica moved her head from side to side as though wounded.

  Ghanima said: “Leto says he must find this Preacher and make sure.”

  “Yes … Of course. I should never have left here. It was cowardly of me.”

  “Why do you blame yourself? You had reached a limit. I know that. Leto knows it. Even Alia may know it.”

  Jessica put a hand to her own throat, rubbed it briefly. Then: “Yes, the problem of Alia.”

  “She works a strange attraction on Leto,” Ghanima said. “That’s why I helped you meet alone with me. He agrees that she is beyond hope, but still he finds ways to be with her and … study her. And … it’s very disturbing. When I try to talk against this, he falls asleep. He—”

  “Is she drugging him?”

  “No-o-o.” Ghanima shook her head. “But he has this odd empathy for her. And … in his sleep, he often mutters Jacurutu.”

  “That again!” And Jessica found herself recounting Gurney’s report about the conspirators exposed at the landing field.

  “I sometimes fear Alia wants Leto to seek out Jacurutu,” Ghanima said. “And I always thought it only a legend. You know it, of course.”

  Jessica shuddered. “Terrible story. Terrible.”

  “What must we do?” Ghanima asked. “I fear to search all of my memories, all of my lives …”

  “Ghani! I warn you against that. You mustn’t risk—”

  “It may happen even if I don’t risk it. How do we know what really happened to Alia?”

  “No! You could be spared that … that possession.” She ground the word out. “Well … Jacurutu, is it? I’ve sent Gurney to find the place—if it exists.”

  “But how can he … Oh! Of course: the smugglers.”

  Jessica found herself silenced by this further example of how Ghanima’s mind worked in concert with what must be an inner awareness of others. Of me! How truly strange it was, Jessica thought, that this young flesh could carry all of Paul’s memories, at least until the moment of Paul’s spermal separation from his own past. It was an invasion of privacy against which something primal in Jessica rebelled. Momentarily she felt herself sinking into the absolute and unswerving Bene Gesserit judgment: Abomination! But there was a sweetness about this child, a willingness to sacrifice for her brother, which could not be denied.

  We are one life reaching out into a dark future, Jessica thought. We are one blood. And she girded herself to accept the events which she and Gurney Halleck had set in motion. Leto must be separated from his sister, must be trained as the Sisterhood insisted.

  ***

  I hear the wind blowing across the desert and I see the moons of a winter night rising like great ships in the void. To them I make my vow: I will be resolute and make an art of government; I will balance my inherited past and become a perfect storehouse of my relic memories. And I will be known for kindliness more than for knowledge. My face will shine down the corridors of time for as long as humans exist.

  —LETO’S VOW AFTER HARQ AL-ADA

  When she had been quite young, Alia Atreides had practiced for hours in the prana-bindu trance, trying to strengthen her own private personality against the onslaught of all those others. She knew the problem—melange could not be escaped in a sietch warren. It infested everything: food, water, air, even the fabrics against which she cried at night. Very early she recognized the uses of the sietch orgy where the tribe drank the death-water of a worm. In the orgy, Fremen released the accumulated pressures of their own genetic memories, and they denied those memories. She saw her companions being temporarily possessed in the orgy.

  For her, there was no such release, no denial. She had possessed fu
ll consciousness long before birth. With that consciousness came a cataclysmic awareness of her circumstances: womb-locked into intense, inescapable contact with the personas of all her ancestors and of those identities death-transmitted in spice-tau to the Lady Jessica. Before birth, Alia had contained every bit of the knowledge required in a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother—plus much, much more from all those others.

  In that knowledge lay recognition of a terrible reality—Abomination. The totality of that knowledge weakened her. The pre-born did not escape. Still she’d fought against the more terrifying of her ancestors, winning for a time a Pyrrhic victory which had lasted through childhood. She’d known a private personality, but it had no immunity against casual intrusions from those who lived their reflected lives through her.

  Thus will I be one day, she thought. This thought chilled her. To walk and dissemble through the life of a child from her own loins, intruding, grasping at consciousness to add a quantum of experience.

  Fear stalked her childhood. It persisted into puberty. She had fought it, never asking for help. Who would understand the help she required? Not her mother, who could never quite drive away that specter of Bene Gesserit judgment: the pre-born were Abomination.

  There had come that night when her brother walked alone into the desert seeking death, giving himself to Shai-Hulud as blind Fremen were supposed to do. Within the month, Alia had been married to Paul’s swordmaster, Duncan Idaho, a mentat brought back from the dead by the arts of the Tleilaxu. Her mother fled back to Caladan. Paul’s twins were Alia’s legal charge.

  And she controlled the Regency.

  Pressures of responsibility had driven the old fears away and she had been wide open to the inner lives, demanding their advice, plunging into spice trance in search of guiding visions.

  The crisis came on a day like many others in the spring month of Laab, a clear morning at Muad’Dib’s Keep with a cold wind blowing down from the pole. Alia still wore the yellow for mourning, the color of the sterile sun. More and more these past few weeks she’d been denying the inner voice of her mother, who tended to sneer at preparation for the coming Holy Days to be centered on the Temple.

  The inner-awareness of Jessica faded, faded … sinking away at last with a faceless demand that Alia would be better occupied working on the Atreides Law. New lives began to clamor for their moment of consciousness. Alia felt that she had opened a bottomless pit, and faces arose out of it like a swarm of locusts, until she came at last to focus on one who was like a beast: the old Baron Harkonnen. In terrified outrage she had screamed out against all of that inner clamor, winning a temporary silence.

  On this morning, Alia took her pre-breakfast walk through the Keep’s roof garden. In a new attempt to win the inner battle, she tried to hold her entire awareness within Choda’s admonition to the Zensunni:

  “Leaving the ladder, one may fall upward!”

  But morning’s glow along the cliffs of the Shield Wall kept distracting her. Plantings of resilient fuzz-grass filled the garden’s pathways. When she looked away from the Shield Wall she saw dew on the grass, the catch of all the moisture which had passed here in the night. It reflected her own passage as of a multitude.

  That multitude made her giddy. Each reflection carried the imprint of a face from the inner multitude.

  She tried to focus her mind on what the grass implied. The presence of plentiful dew told her how far the ecological transformation had progressed on Arrakis. The climate of these northern latitudes was growing warmer; atmospheric carbon dioxide was on the increase. She reminded herself how many new hectares would be put under green plants in the coming year—and it required thirty-seven thousand cubic feet of water to irrigate just one hectare.

  Despite every attempt at mundane thoughts, she could not drive away the sharklike circling of all those others within her.

  She put her hands to her forehead and pressed.

  Her temple guards had brought her a prisoner to judge at sunset the previous day: one Essas Paymon, a dark little man ostensibly in the pay of a house minor, the Nebiros, who traded in holy artifacts and small manufactured items for decoration. Actually Paymon was known to be a CHOAM spy whose task was to assess the yearly spice crop. Alia had been on the point of sending him into the dungeons when he’d protested loudly “the injustice of the Atreides.” That could have brought him an immediate sentence of death on the hanging tripod, but Alia had been caught by his boldness. She’d spoken sternly from her Throne of Judgment, trying to frighten him into revealing more than he’d already told her inquisitors.

  “Why are our spice crops of such interest to the Combine Honnete?” she demanded. “Tell us and we may spare you.”

  “I only collect something for which there is a market,” Paymon said. “I know nothing of what is done with my harvest.”

  “And for this petty profit you interfere with our royal plans?” Alia demanded.

  “Royalty never considers that we might have plans, too,” he countered.

  Alia, captivated by his desperate audacity, said: “Essas Paymon, will you work for me?”

  At this a grin whitened his dark face, and he said: “You were about to obliterate me without a qualm. What is my new value that you should suddenly make a market for it?”

  “You’ve a simple and practical value,” she said. “You’re bold and you’re for hire to the highest bidder. I can bid higher than any other in the Empire.”

  At which, he named a remarkable sum which he required for his services, but Alia laughed and countered with a figure she considered more reasonable and undoubtedly far more than he’d ever before received. She added: “And, of course, I throw in the gift of your life upon which, I presume, you place an even more inordinate value.”

  “A bargain!” Paymon cried and, at a signal from Alia, was led away by her priestly Master of Appointments, Ziarenko Javid.

  Less than an hour later, as Alia prepared to leave the Judgment Hall, Javid came hurrying to report that Paymon had been overheard to mutter the fateful lines from the Orange Catholic Bible: “Maleficos non patieris vivere.”

  “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Alia translated. So that was his gratitude! He was one of those who plotted against her very life! In a flush of rage such as she’d never before experienced, she ordered Paymon’s immediate execution, sending his body to the Temple deathstill where his water, at least, would be of some value in the priestly coffers.

  And all night long Paymon’s dark face haunted her.

  She tried all of her tricks against this persistent, accusing image, reciting the Bu Ji from the Fremen Book of Kreos: “Nothing occurs! Nothing occurs! ” But Paymon took her through a wearing night into this giddy new day, where she could see that his face had joined those in the jeweled reflections from the dew.

  A female guard called her to breakfast from the roof door behind a low hedge of mimosa. Alia sighed. She felt small choice between hells: the outcry within her mind or the outcry from her attendants—all were pointless voices, but persistent in their demands, hourglass noises that she would like to silence with the edge of a knife.

  Ignoring the guard, Alia stared across the roof garden toward the Shield Wall. A bahada had left its broad outwash like a detrital fan upon the sheltered floor of her domain. The delta of sand spread out before her gaze, outlined by the morning sun. It came to her that an uninitiated eye might see that broad fan as evidence of a river’s flow, but it was no more than the place where her brother had shattered the Shield Wall with the Atreides Family atomics, opening a path from the desert for the sandworms which had carried his Fremen troops to shocking victory over his Imperial predecessor, Shaddam IV. Now a broad qanat flowed with water on the Shield Wall’s far side to block off sandworm intrusions. Sandworms would not cross open water; it poisoned them.

  Would that I had such a barrier within my mind, she thought.

  The thought increased her giddy sensation of being separated from reality.

 
Sandworms! Sandworms!

  Her memory presented a collection of sandworm images: mighty Shai-Hulud, the demiurge of the Fremen, deadly beast of the desert’s depths whose outpourings included the priceless spice. How odd it was, this sandworm, to grow from a flat and leathery sandtrout, she thought. They were like the flocking multitude within her awareness. The sandtrout, when linked edge to edge against the planet’s bedrock, formed living cisterns; they held back the water that their sandworm vector might live. Alia could feel the analogy: some of those others within her mind held back dangerous forces which could destroy her.

  Again the guard called her to breakfast, a note of impatience apparent.

  Angrily Alia turned, waved a dismissal signal.

  The guard obeyed, but the roof door slammed.

  At the sound of the slamming door, Alia felt herself caught by everything she had attempted to deny. The other lives welled up within her like a hideous tide. Each demanding life pressed its face against her vision centers—a cloud of faces. Some presented mange-spotted skin, other were callous and full of sooty shadows; there were mouths like moist lozenges. The pressure of the swarm washed over her in a current which demanded that she float free and plunge into them.

  “No,” she whispered. “No … no … no …”

  She would have collapsed onto the path but for a bench beside her which accepted her sagging body. She tried to sit, could not, stretched out on the cold plasteel, still whispering denial.

  The tide continued to rise within her.

  She felt attuned to the slightest show of attention, aware of the risk, but alert for every exclamation from those guarded mouths which clamored within her. They were a cacophony of demand for her attention: “Me! Me!” “No, me!” And she knew that if she once gave her attention, gave it completely, she would be lost. To behold one face out of the multitude and follow the voice of that face would be to be held by the egocentrism which shared her existence.