Dune Messiah dc-2

by Frank Herbert

  Hurt, she’d said: “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Ahhh, dearest one,” he’d said, soothing, “we are so money-rich and so life-poor. I am evil, obstinate, stupid …”

  “You are not!”

  “That, too, is true. But my hands are blue with time. I think … I think I tried to invent life, not realizing it’d already been invented.”

  And he’d touched her abdomen to feel the new life there.

  Remembering, she placed both hands over her abdomen and trembled, sorry that she’d asked Paul to bring her here.

  The desert wind had stirred up evil odors from the fringe plantings which anchored the dunes at the cliff base. Fremen superstition gripped her: evil odors, evil times. She faced into the wind, saw a worm appear outside the plantings. It arose like the prow of a demon ship out of the dunes, threshed sand, smelled the water deadly to its kind, and fled beneath a long, burrowing mound.

  She hated the water then, inspired by the worm’s fear. Water, once the spirit-soul of Arrakis, had become a poison. Water brought pestilence. Only the desert was clean.

  Below her, a Fremen work gang appeared. They climbed, to the sietch’s middle entrance, and she saw that they had muddy feet.

  Fremen with muddy feet!

  The children of the sietch began singing to the morning above her, their voices piping from the upper entrance. The voices made her feel time fleeing from her like hawks before the wind. She shuddered.

  What storms did Paul see with his eyeless vision?

  She sensed a vicious madman in him, someone weary of songs and polemics.

  The sky, she noted, had become crystal gray filled with alabaster rays, bizarre designs etched across the heavens by windborne sand. A line of gleaming white in the south caught her attention. Eyes suddenly alerted, she interpreted the sign: White sky in the south: Shai-hulud’s mouth. A storm came, big wind. She felt the warning breeze, a crystal blowing of sand against her cheeks. The incense of death came on the wind: odors of water flowing in qanats, sweating sand, flint. The water—that was why Shai-hulud sent his coriolis wind.

  Hawks appeared in the cleft where she stood, seeking safety from the wind. They were brown as the rocks and with scarlet in their wings. She felt her spirit go out to them: they had a place to hide; she had none.

  “M’Lady, the wind comes!”

  She turned, saw the ghola calling to her outside the upper entrance to the sietch. Fremen fears gripped her. Clean death and the body’s water claimed for the tribe, these she understood. But … something brought back from death …

  Windblown sand whipped at her, reddened her cheeks. She glanced over her shoulder at the frightful band of dust across the sky. The desert beneath the storm had taken on a tawny, restless appearance as though dune waves beat on a tempest shore the way Paul had once described a sea. She hesitated, caught by a feeling of the desert’s transience. Measured against eternity, this was no more than a caldron. Dune surf thundered against cliffs.

  The storm out there had become a universal thing for her—all the animals hiding from it … nothing left of the desert but its own private sounds: blown sand scraping along rock, a wind-surge whistling, the gallop of a boulder tumbled suddenly from its hill—then! somewhere out of sight, a capsized worm thumping its idiot way aright and slithering off to its dry depths.

  It was only a moment as her life measured time, but in that moment she felt this planet being swept away—cosmic dust, part of other waves.

  “We must hurry,” the ghola said from right beside her.

  She sensed fear in him then, concern for her safety.

  “It’ll shred the flesh from your bones,” he said, as though he needed to explain such a storm to her.

  Her fear of him dispelled by his obvious concern, Chani allowed the ghola to help her up the rock stairway to the sietch. They entered the twisting baffle which protected the entrance. Attendants opened the moisture seals, closed them behind.

  Sietch odors assaulted her nostrils. The place was a ferment of nasal memories—the warren closeness of bodies, rank esters of the reclamation stills, familiar food aromas, the flinty burning of machines at work … and through it all, the omnipresent spice: melange everywhere.

  She took a deep breath. “Home.”

  The ghola took his hand from her arm, stood aside, a patient figure now, almost as though turned off when not in use. Yet … he watched.

  Chani hesitated in the entrance chamber, puzzled by something she could not name. This was truly her home. As a child, she’d hunted scorpions here by glowglobe light. Something was changed, though …

  “Shouldn’t you be going to your quarters, m’Lady?” the ghola asked.

  As though ignited by his words, a rippling birth constriction seized her abdomen. She fought against revealing it.

  “M’Lady?” the ghola said.

  “Why is Paul afraid for me to bear our children?” she asked.

  “It is a natural thing to fear for your safety,” the ghola said.

  She put a hand to her cheek where the sand had reddened it. “And he doesn’t fear for the children?”

  “M’Lady, he cannot think of a child without remembering that your firstborn was slain by the Sardaukar.”

  She studied the ghola—flat face, unreadable mechanical eyes. Was he truly Duncan Idaho, this creature? Was he friend to anyone? Had he spoken truthfully now?

  “You should be with the medics,” the ghola said.

  Again, she heard the fear for her safety in his voice. She felt abruptly that her mind lay undefended, ready to be invaded by shocking perceptions.

  “Hayt, I’m afraid,” she whispered. “Where is my Usul?”

  “Affairs of state detain him,” the ghola said.

  She nodded, thinking of the government apparatus which had accompanied them in a great flight of ornithopters. Abruptly, she realized what puzzled her about the sietch: outworld odors. The clerks and aides had brought their own perfumes into this environment, aromas of diet and clothing, of exotic toiletries. They were an undercurrent of odors here.

  Chani shook herself, concealing an urge to bitter laughter. Even the smells changed in Muad’dib’s presence!

  “There were pressing matters which he could not defer,” the ghola said, misreading her hesitation.

  “Yes … yes, I understand. I came with that swarm, too.” Recalling the flight from Arrakeen, she admitted to herself now that she had not expected to survive it. Paul had insisted on piloting his own ’thopter. Eyeless, he had guided the machine here. After that experience, she knew nothing he did could surprise her.

  Another pain fanned out through her abdomen.

  The ghola saw her indrawn breath, the tightening of her cheeks, said: “Is it your time?”

  “I … yes, it is.”

  “You must not delay,” he said. He grasped her arm, hurried her down the hall.

  She sensed panic in him, said: “There’s time.”

  He seemed not to hear. “The Zensunni approach to birth,” he said, urging her even faster, “is to wait without purpose in the state of highest tension. Do not compete with what is happening. To compete is to prepare for failure. Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. This way, you achieve everything.”

  While he spoke, they reached the entrance to her quarters. He thrust her through the hangings, cried out: “Harah! Harah! It is Chani’s time. Summon the medics!”

  His call brought attendants running. There was a great bustling of people in which Chani felt herself an isolated island of calm … until the next pain came.

  Hayt, dismissed to the outer passage, took time to wonder at his own actions. He felt fixated at some point of time where all truths were only temporary. Panic lay beneath his actions, he realized. Panic centered not on the possibility that Chani might die, but that Paul should come to him afterward … filled with grief … his loved one … gone … gone …

  Something cannot emerge from nothing, the ghola told himself. From
what does this panic emerge?

  He felt that his mentat faculties had been dulled, let out a long, shuddering breath. A psychic shadow passed over him. In the emotional darkness of it, he felt himself waiting for some absolute sound—the snap of a branch in a jungle.

  A sigh shook him. Danger had passed without striking.

  Slowly, marshaling his powers, shedding bits of inhibition, he sank into mentat awareness. He forced it—not the best way—but somehow necessary. Ghost shadows moved within him in place of people. He was a trans-shipping station for every datum he had ever encountered. His being was inhabited by creatures of possibility. They passed in review to be compared, judged.

  Perspiration broke out on his forehead.

  Thoughts with fuzzy edges feathered away into darkness—unknown. Infinite systems! A mentat could not function without realizing he worked in infinite systems. Fixed knowledge could not surround the infinite. Everywhere could not be brought into finite perspective. Instead, he must become the infinite—momentarily.

  In one gestalten spasm, he had it, seeing Bijaz seated before him blazing from some inner fire.

  Bijaz!

  The dwarf had done something to him!

  Hayt felt himself teetering on the lip of a deadly pit. He projected the mentat computation line forward, seeing what could develop out of his own actions.

  “A compulsion!” he gasped. “I’ve been rigged with a compulsion!”

  A blue-robed courier, passing as Hayt spoke, hesitated. “Did you say something, sirra?”

  Not looking at him, the ghola nodded. “I said everything.”

  ***

  There was a man so wise,

  He jumped into

  A sandy place

  And burnt out both his eyes!

  And when he knew his eyes were gone,

  He offered no complaint.

  He summoned up a vision

  And made himself a saint.

  —CHILDREN’S VERSE FROM HISTORY OF MUAD’DIB

  Paul stood in darkness outside the sietch. Oracular vision told him it was night, that moonlight silhouetted the shrine atop Chin Rock high on his left. This was a memory-saturated place, his first sietch, where he and Chani …

  I must not think of Chani, he told himself.

  The thinning cup of his vision told him of changes all around—a cluster of palms far down to the right, the black-silver line of a qanat carrying water through the dunes piled up by that morning’s storm.

  Water flowing in the desert! He recalled another kind of water flowing in a river of his birthworld, Caladan. He hadn’t realized then the treasure of such a flow, even the murky slithering in a qanat across a desert basin. Treasure.

  With a delicate cough, an aide came up from behind.

  Paul held out his hands for a magnabord with a single sheet of metallic paper on it. He moved as sluggishly as the qanat’s water. The vision flowed, but he found himself increasingly reluctant to move with it.

  “Pardon, Sire,” the aide said. “The Semboule Treaty—your signature?”

  “I can read it!” Paul snapped. He scrawled “Atreides Imper.” in the proper place, returned the board, thrusting it directly into the aide’s outstretched hand, aware of the fear this inspired.

  The man fled.

  Paul turned away. Ugly, barren land! He imagined it sun-soaked and monstrous with heat, a place of sandslides and the drowned darkness of dust pools, blowdevils unreeling tiny dunes across the rocks, their narrow bellies full of ochre crystals. But it was a rich land, too: big, exploding out of narrow places with vistas of storm-trodden emptiness, rampart cliffs and tumbledown ridges.

  All it required was water … and love.

  Life changed those irascible wastes into shapes of grace and movement, he thought. That was the message of the desert. Contrast stunned him with realization. He wanted to turn to the aides massed in the sietch entrance, shout at them: If you need something to worship, then worship life—all life, every last crawling bit of it! We’re all in this beauty together!

  They wouldn’t understand. In the desert, they were endlessly desert. Growing things performed no green ballet for them.

  He clenched his fists at his sides, trying to halt the vision. He wanted to flee from his own mind. It was a beast come to devour him! Awareness lay in him, sodden, heavy with all the living it had sponged up, saturated with too many experiences.

  Desperately, Paul squeezed his thoughts outward.

  Stars!

  Awareness turned over at the thought of all those stars above him—an infinite volume. A man must be half mad to imagine he could rule even a teardrop of that volume. He couldn’t begin to imagine the number of subjects his Imperium claimed.

  Subjects? Worshippers and enemies, more likely. Did any among them see beyond rigid beliefs? Where was one man who’d escaped the narrow destiny of his prejudices? Not even an Emperor escaped. He’d lived a take-everything life, tried to create a universe in his own image. But the exultant universe was breaking across him at last with its silent waves.

  I spit on Dune! he thought. I give it my moisture!

  This myth he’d made out of intricate movements and imagination, out of moonlight and love, out of prayers older than Adam, and gray cliffs and crimson shadows, laments and rivers of martyrs—what had it come to at last? When the waves receded, the shores of Time would spread out there clean, empty, shining with infinite grains of memory and little else. Was this the golden genesis of man?

  Sand scuffed against rocks told him that the ghola had joined him.

  “You’ve been avoiding me today, Duncan,” Paul said.

  “It’s dangerous for you to call me that,” the ghola said.

  “I know.”

  “I … came to warn you, m’Lord.”

  “I know.”

  The story of the compulsion Bijaz had put on him poured from the ghola then.

  “Do you know the nature of the compulsion?” Paul asked.

  “Violence.”

  Paul felt himself arriving at a place which had claimed him from the beginning. He stood suspended. The Jihad had seized him, fixed him onto a glidepath from which the terrible gravity of the Future would never release him.

  “There’ll be no violence from Duncan,” Paul whispered.

  “But, Sire …”

  “Tell me what you see around us,” Paul said.

  “M’Lord?”

  “The desert—how is it tonight?”

  “Don’t you see it?”

  “I have no eyes, Duncan.”

  “But …”

  “I’ve only my vision,” Paul said, “and wish I didn’t have it. I’m dying of prescience, did you know that, Duncan?”

  “Perhaps … what you fear won’t happen,” the ghola said.

  “What? Deny my own oracle? How can I when I’ve seen it fulfilled thousands of times? People call it a power, a gift. It’s an affliction! It won’t let me leave my life where I found it!”

  “M’Lord,” the ghola muttered, “I … it isn’t … young master, you don’t … I …” He fell silent.

  Paul sensed the ghola’s confusion, said: “What’d you call me, Duncan?”

  “What? What I … for a moment …”

  “You called me ‘young master.’ ”

  “I did, yes.”

  “That’s what Duncan always called me.” Paul reached out, touched the ghola’s face. “Was that part of your Tleilaxu training?”

  “No.”

  Paul lowered his hand. “What, then?”

  “It came from … me.”

  “Do you serve two masters?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Free yourself from the ghola, Duncan.”

  “How?”

  “You’re human. Do a human thing.”

  “I’m a ghola!”

  “But your flesh is human. Duncan’s in there.”

  “Something’s in there.”

  “I care not how you do it,” Paul said, “but you’ll do i
t.”

  “You’ve foreknowledge?”

  “Foreknowledge be damned!” Paul turned away. His vision hurtled forward now, gaps in it, but it wasn’t a thing to be stopped.

  “M’Lord, if you’ve—”

  “Quiet!” Paul held up a hand. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what, m’Lord?”

  Paul shook his head. Duncan hadn’t heard it. Had he only imagined the sound? It’d been his tribal name called from the desert—far away and low: “Usul … Uuuussssuuuullll …”

  “What is it, m’Lord?”

  Paul shook his head. He felt watched. Something out there in the night shadows knew he was here. Something? No—someone.

  “It was mostly sweet,” he whispered, “and you were the sweetest of all.”

  “What’d you say, m’Lord?”

  “It’s the future,” Paul said.

  That amorphous human universe out there had undergone a spurt of motion, dancing to the tune of his vision. It had struck a powerful note then. The ghost-echoes might endure.

  “I don’t understand, m’Lord,” the ghola said.

  “A Fremen dies when he’s too long from the desert,” Paul said. “They call it the ‘water sickness.’ Isn’t that odd?”

  “That’s very odd.”

  Paul strained at memories, tried to recall the sound of Chani breathing beside him in the night. Where is there comfort? he wondered. All he could remember was Chani at breakfast the day they’d left for the desert. She’d been restless, irritable.

  “Why do you wear that old jacket?” she’d demanded, eyeing the black uniform coat with its red hawk crest beneath his Fremen robes. “You’re an Emperor!”

  “Even an Emperor has his favorite clothing,” he’d said.

  For no reason he could explain, this had brought real tears to Chani’s eyes—the second time in her life when Fremen inhibitions had been shattered.

  Now, in the darkness, Paul rubbed his own cheeks, felt moisture there. Who gives moisture to the dead? he wondered. It was his own face, yet not his. The wind chilled the wet skin. A frail dream formed, broke. What was this swelling in his breast? Was it something he’d eaten? How bitter and plaintive was this other self, giving moisture to the dead. The wind bristled with sand. The skin, dry now, was his own. But whose was the quivering which remained?