Children of Dune dc-3

by Frank Herbert

  Why did she bother? Jessica wondered. She had only to wait for the man to die of asphyxiation. The act was a desperate one, a sign of deep fear.

  Alia sat forward on the edge of her throne, her eyes aglitter with watchfulness. A slender woman wearing the braid knots of Alia’s own guards strode past Jessica, bent over the Priest, straightened, and looked back at the dais. “He is dead.”

  “Have him removed,” Alia called. She motioned to guards below the dais. “Straighten the Lady Jessica’s chair.”

  So you’ll try to brazen it out! Jessica thought. Did Alia think anyone had been fooled? Al-Fali had spoken of the Qadis as-Salaf, calling on the holy fathers of Fremen mythology as his protectors. But no supernatural agency had brought a maula pistol into this room where no weapons were permitted. A conspiracy involving Javid’s people was the only answer, and Alia’s unconcern about her own person told everyone she was a part of that conspiracy.

  The old Naib spoke over his shoulder to Jessica: “Accept my apologies, My Lady. We of the desert come to you as our last desperate hope, and now we see that you still have need of us.”

  “Matricide does not sit well on my daughter,” Jessica said.

  “The tribes will hear of this,” al-Fali promised.

  “If you have such desperate need of me,” Jessica asked, “why did you not approach me at the Convocation in Sietch Tabr?”

  “Stilgar would not permit it.”

  Ahhh, Jessica thought, the rule of the Naibs! In Tabr, Stilgar’s word was law.

  The toppled throne had been straightened. Alia motioned for her mother to return, said: “All of you please note the death of that traitor-Priest. Those who threaten me die.” She glanced at al-Fali. “My thanks to you, Naib.”

  “Thanks for a mistake,” al-Fali muttered. He looked at Jessica. “You were right. My rage removed one who should’ve been questioned.”

  Jessica whispered: “Mark those two courtiers and the woman in the colorful dress, Fedaykin. I want them taken and questioned.”

  “It will be done,” he said.

  “If we get out of here alive,” Jessica said. “Come, let us go back and play our parts.”

  “As you say, My Lady.”

  Together, they returned to the dais, Jessica mounting the steps and resuming her position beside Alia, al-Fali remaining in the supplicant’s position below.

  “Now,” Alia said.

  “One moment, daughter,” Jessica said. She held up her sleeve, exposed the hole with a finger through it. “The attack was aimed at me. The pellet almost found me even as I was dodging. You will all note that the maula pistol is no longer down there.” She pointed. “Who has it?”

  There was no response.

  “Perhaps it could be traced,” Jessica said.

  “What nonsense!” Alia said. “I was the—”

  Jessica half turned toward her daughter, motioned with her left hand. “Someone down there has that pistol. Don’t you have a fear that—”

  “One of my guards has it!” Alia said.

  “Then that guard will bring the weapon to me,” Jessica said.

  “She’s already taken it away.”

  “How convenient,” Jessica said.

  “What are you saying?” Alia demanded.

  Jessica allowed herself a grim smile. “I am saying that two of your people were charged with saving that traitor-Priest. I warned them that they would die if he died. They will die.”

  “I forbid it!”

  Jessica merely shrugged.

  “We have a brave Fedaykin here,” Alia said, motioning toward al-Fali.

  “This argument can wait.”

  “It can wait forever,” Jessica said, speaking in Chakobsa, her words double-barbed to tell Alia that no argument would stop the death command.

  “We shall see!” Alia said. She turned to al-Fali. “Why are you here, Ghadhean al-Fali?”

  “To see the mother of Muad’Dib,” the Naib said. “What is left of the Fedaykin, that band of brothers who served her son, pooled their poor resources to buy my way in here past the avaricious guardians who shield the Atreides from the realities of Arrakis.”

  Alia said: “Anything the Fedaykin require, they have only—”

  “He came to see me,” Jessica interrupted. “What is your desperate need, Fedaykin?”

  Alia said: “I speak for the Atreides here! What is—”

  “Be silent, you murderous Abomination!” Jessica snapped. “You tried to have me killed, daughter! I say it for all here to know. You can’t have everyone in this hall killed to silence them—as that Priest was silenced. Yes, the Naib’s blow would’ve killed the man, but he could’ve been saved. He could’ve been questioned! You have no concern that he was silenced. Spray your protests upon us as you will, your guilt is written in your actions!”

  Alia sat in frozen silence, face pale. And Jessica, watching the play of emotions across her daughter’s face, saw a terrifyingly familiar movement of Alia’s hands, an unconscious response which once had identified a deadly enemy of the Atreides. Alia’s fingers moved in a tapping rhythm—little finger twice, index finger three times, ring finger twice, little finger once, ring finger twice … and back through the tapping in the same order.

  The old Baron!

  The focus of Jessica’s eyes caught Alia’s attention and she glanced down at her hand, held it still, looked back at her mother to see the terrible recognition. A gloating smile locked Alia’s mouth.

  “So you have your revenge upon us,” Jessica whispered.

  “Have you gone mad, mother?” Alia asked.

  “I wish I had,” Jessica said. And she thought: She knows I will confirm this to the Sisterhood. She knows. She may even suspect I’ll tell the Fremen and force her into a Trial of Possession. She cannot let me leave here alive.

  “Our brave Fedaykin waits while we argue,” Alia said.

  Jessica forced her attention back to the old Naib. She brought her responses under control, said: “You came to see me, Ghadhean.”

  “Yes, My Lady. We of the desert see terrible things happening. The Little Makers come out of the sand as was foretold in the oldest prophecies. Shai-Hulud no longer can be found except in the deeps of the Empty Quarter. We have abandoned our friend, the desert!”

  Jessica glanced at Alia, who merely motioned for Jessica to continue. Jessica looked out over the throng in the Chamber, saw the shocked alertness on every face. The import of the fight between mother and daughter had not been lost on this throng, and they must wonder why the audience continued. She returned her attention to al-Fali.

  “Ghadean, what is this talk of Little Makers and the scarcity of sandworms? ”

  “Mother of Moisture,” he said, using her old Fremen title, “we were warned of this in the Kitab al-Ibar. We beseech thee. Let it not be forgotten that on the day Muad’Dib died, Arrakis turned by itself! We cannot abandon the desert.”

  “Hah!” Alia sneered. “The superstitious riffraff of the Inner Desert fear the ecological transformation. They—”

  “I hear you, Ghadhean,” Jessica said. “If the worms go, the spice goes. If the spice goes, what coin do we have to buy our way?”

  Sounds of surprise: gasps and startled whispers could be heard spreading across the Great Hall. The Chamber echoed to the sound.

  Alia shrugged. “Superstitious nonsense!”

  Al-Fali lifted his right hand to point at Alia. “I speak to the Mother of Moisture, not to the Coan-Teen!”

  Alia’s hands gripped the arms of her throne, but she remained seated.

  Al-Fali looked at Jessica. “Once it was the land where nothing grew. Now there are plants. They spread like lice upon a wound. There have been clouds and rain along the belt of Dune! Rain, My Lady! Oh, precious mother of Muad’Dib, as sleep is death’s brother, so is rain on the Belt of Dune. It is the death of us all.”

  “We do only what Liet-Kynes and Muad’Dib himself designed for us to do,” Alia protested. “What is all of this super
stitious gabble? We revere the words of Liet-Kynes, who told us: ‘I wish to see this entire planet caught up in a net of green plants.’ So it will be.”

  “And what of the worms and the spice?” Jessica asked.

  “There’ll always be some desert,” Alia said. “The worms will survive.”

  She’s lying, Jessica thought. Why does she lie?

  “Help us, Mother of Moisture,” al-Fali pleaded.

  With an abrupt sensation of double vision, Jessica felt her awareness lurch, propelled by the old Naib’s words. It was the unmistakable adab, the demanding memory which came upon one of itself. It came without qualifications and held her senses immobile while the lesson of the past was impressed upon her awareness. She was caught up in it completely, a fish in the net. Yet she felt the demand of it as a human-most moment, each small part a reminder of creation. Every element of the lesson-memory was real but insubstantial in its constant change, and she knew this was the closest she might ever come to experiencing the prescient dietgrasp which had inflicted itself upon her son.

  Alia lied because she was possessed by one who would destroy the Atreides. She was, in herself, the first destruction. Then al-Fali spoke the truth: the sandworms are doomed unless the course of the ecological transformation is modified.

  In the pressure of revelation, Jessica saw the people of the audience reduced to slow motion, their roles identified for her. She could pick the ones charged with seeing that she did not leave here alive! And the path through them lay there in her awareness as though outlined in bright light—confusion among them, one of them feinted to stumble into another, whole groups tangled. She saw, also, that she might leave this Great Hall only to fall into other hands. Alia did not care if she created a martyr. No—the thing which possessed her did not care.

  Now, in this frozen time, Jessica chose a way to save the old Naib and send him as messenger. The way through the audience remained indelibly clear. How simple it was! They were buffoons with barricaded eyes, their shoulders held in positions of immovable defense. Each position upon the great floor could be seen as an atrophic collision from which dead flesh might slough away to reveal skeletons. Their bodies, their clothes, and their faces described individual hells—the insucked breast of concealed terrors, the glittering hook of a jewel become substitute armor; the mouths were judgments full of frightened absolutes, cathedral prisms of eyebrows showing lofty and religious sentiments which their loins denied.

  Jessica sensed dissolution in the shaping forces loosed upon Arrakis. Al-Fali’s voice had been like a distrans in her soul, awakening a beast from the deepest part of her.

  In an eyeblink Jessica moved from the adab into the universe of movement, but it was a different universe from the one which had commanded her attention only a second before.

  Alia was starting to speak, but Jessica said: “Silence!” Then: “There are those who fear that I have returned without reservation to the Sisterhood. But since that day in the desert when the Fremen gave the gift of life to me and to my son, I have been Fremen!” And she lapsed into the old tongue which only those in this room who could profit by it would understand: “Onsar akhaka zeliman aw maslumen!” Support your brother in his time of need, whether he be just or unjust!

  Her words had the desired effect, a subtle shifting of positions within the Chamber.

  But Jessica raged on: “This Ghadhean al-Fali, an honest Fremen, comes here to tell me what others should have revealed to me. Let no one deny this! The ecological transformation has become a tempest out of control!”

  Wordless confirmations could be seen throughout the room.

  “And my daughter delights in this!” Jessica said. “Mektub al-mellah! You carve wounds upon my flesh and write there in salt! Why did the Atreides find a home here? Because the Mohalata was natural to us. To the Atreides, government was always a protective partnership: Mohalata, as the Fremen have always known it. Now look at her!” Jessica pointed at Alia. “She laughs alone at night in contemplation of her own evil! Spice production will fall to nothing, or at best a fraction of its former level! And when word of that gets out—”

  “We’ll have a corner on the most priceless product in the universe!” Alia shouted.

  “We’ll have a corner on hell!” Jessica raged.

  And Alia lapsed into the most ancient Chakobsa, the Atreides private language with its difficult glottal stops and clicks: “Now, you know, mother! Did you think a granddaughter of Baron Harkonnen would not appreciate all of the lifetimes you crushed into my awareness before I was even born? When I raged against what you’d done to me, I had only to ask myself what the Baron would’ve done. And he answered! Understand me, Atreides bitch! He answered me!”

  Jessica heard the venom and the confirmation of her guess. Abomination! Alia had been overwhelmed within, possessed by that cahueit of evil, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. The Baron himself spoke from her mouth now, uncaring of what was revealed. He wanted her to see his revenge, wanted her to know that he could not be cast out.

  I’m supposed to remain here helpless in my knowledge, Jessica thought. With the thought, she launched herself onto the path the adab had revealed, shouting: “Fedaykin, follow me!”

  It turned out there were six Fedaykin in the room, and five of them won through behind her.

  ***

  When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.

  —WORDS OF AN ANCIENT PHILOSOPHER (ATTRIBUTED BY HARQ AL-ADA TO ONE LOUIS VEUILLOT)

  Leto leaned out the covert exit from the sietch, saw the bight of the cliff towering above his limited view. Late afternoon sunlight cast long shadows in the cliff’s vertical striations. A skeleton butterfly flew in and out of the shadows, its webbed wings a transparent lacery against the light. How delicate that butterfly was to exist here, he thought.

  Directly ahead of him lay the apricot orchard, with children working there to gather the fallen fruit. Beyond the orchard was the qanat. He and Ghanima had given the slip to their guards by losing themselves in a sudden crush of incoming workers. It had been a relatively simple matter to worm their way down an air passage to its connection with the steps to the covert exit. Now they had only to mingle themselves with the children, work their way to the qanat and drop into the tunnel. There they could move beside the predator fish which kept sandtrout from encysting the tribe’s irrigation water. No Fremen would yet think of a human risking accidental immersion in water.

  He stepped out of the protective passages. The cliff stretched away on both sides of him, turned horizontal just by the act of his own movement.

  Ghanima moved closely behind him. Both carried small fruit baskets woven of spice-fiber, but each basket carried a sealed package: Fremkit, maula pistol, crysknife … and the new robes sent by Farad’n.

  Ghanima followed her brother into the orchard, mingled with the working children. Stillsuit masks concealed every face. They were just two more workers here, but she felt the action drawing her life away from protective boundaries and known ways. What a simple step it was, that step from one danger into another!

  In their baskets those new garments sent by Farad’n conveyed a purpose well understood by both of them. Ghanima had accented this knowledge by sewing their personal motto, “We Share,” in Chakobsa above the hawk crest at each breast.

  It would be twilight soon and, beyond the qanat which marked off sietch cultivation, there would come a special quality of evening which few places in the universe could match. It would be that softly lighted desert world with its persistent solitude, its saturated sense that each creature in it was alone in a new universe.

  “We’ve been seen,” Ghanima whispered, bending to work beside her brother.

  “Guards?”

  “No—others.”

  “Good.”

  “We must move swiftly,” she said.

  Leto acknowledged
this by moving away from the cliff through the orchard. He thought with his father’s thoughts: Everything remains mobile in the desert or perishes. Far out on the sand he could see The Attendant’s outcropping, reminder of the need for mobility. The rocks lay static and rigid in their watchful enigma, fading yearly before the onslaught of wind-driven sand. One day The Attendant would be sand.

  As they neared the qanat they heard music from a high entrance of the sietch. It was an old-style Fremen group—two-holed flutes, tambourines, tympani made on spice-plastic drums with skins stretched taut across one end. No one asked what animal on this planet provided that much skin.

  Stilgar will remember what I told him about that cleft in The Attendant, Leto thought. He’ll come in the dark when it’s too late—and then he’ll know.

  Presently they were at the qanat. They slipped into an open tube, climbed down the inspection ladder to the service ledge. It was dusky, damp, and cold in the qanat and they could hear the predator fish splashing. Any sandtrout trying to steal this water would find its water-softened inner surface attacked by the fish. Humans must be wary of them, too.

  “Careful,” Leto said, moving down the slippery ledge. He fastened his memory to times and places his flesh had never known. Ghanima followed.

  At the end of the qanat they stripped to their stillsuits and put on the new robes. They left the old Fremen robes behind as they climbed out another inspection tube, wormed their way over a dune and down the far side. There they sat shielded from the sietch, strapped on maula pistols and crysknives, slipped the Fremkit packs onto their shoulders. They no longer could hear the music.

  Leto arose, struck out through the valley between the dunes.

  Ghanima fell into step behind him, moving with practiced unrhythmical quiet over the open sand.