“You see it there on my hip?” Feyd-Rautha whispered. “Your death, fool.” And he began twisting himself around, forcing the poisoned needle closer and closer. “It’ll stop your muscles and my knife will finish you. There’ll be never a trace left to detect!”
Paul strained, hearing the silent screams in his mind, his cell-stamped ancestors demanding that he use the secret word to slow Feyd-Rautha, to save himself.
“I will not say it!” Paul gasped.
Feyd-Rautha gaped at him, caught in the merest fraction of hesitation. It was enough for Paul to find the weakness of balance in one of his opponent’s leg muscles, and their positions were reversed. Feyd-Rautha lay partly underneath with right hip high, unable to turn because of the tiny needle point caught against the floor beneath him.
Paul twisted his left hand free, aided by the lubrication of blood from his arm, thrust once hard up underneath Feyd-Rautha’s jaw. The point slid home into the brain. Feyd-Rautha jerked and sagged back, still held partly on his side by the needle imbedded in the floor.
Breathing deeply to restore his calm, Paul pushed himself away and got to his feet. He stood over the body, knife in hand, raised his eyes with deliberate slowness to look across the room at the Emperor.
“Majesty,” Paul said, “your force is reduced by one more. Shall we now shed sham and pretense? Shall we now discuss what must be? Your daughter wed to me and the way opened for an Atreides to sit on the throne.”
The Emperor turned, looked at Count Fenring. The Count met his stare—gray eyes against green. The thought lay there clearly between them, their association so long that understanding could be achieved with a glance.
Kill this upstart for me, the Emperor was saying. The Atreides is young and resourceful, yes—but he is also tired from long effort and he’d be no match for you, anyway. Call him out now ... you know the way of it. Kill him.
Slowly, Fenring moved his head, a prolonged turning until he faced Paul.
“Do it!” the Emperor hissed.
The Count focused on Paul, seeing with eyes his Lady Margot had trained in the Bene Gesserit way, aware of the mystery and hidden grandeur about this Atreides youth.
I could kill him, Fenring thought—and he knew this for a truth.
Something in his own secretive depths stayed the Count then, and he glimpsed briefly, inadequately, the advantage he held over Paul—a way of hiding from the youth, a furtiveness of person and motives that no eye could penetrate.
Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost-Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern—a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he’d ever experienced.
Fenring, reading Paul’s emotion, said, “Majesty, I must refuse.”
Rage overcame Shaddam IV. He took two short steps through the entourage, cuffed Fenring viciously across the jaw.
A dark flush spread up and over the Count’s face. He looked directly at the Emperor, spoke with deliberate lack of emphasis: “We have been friends, Majesty. What I do now is out of friendship. I shall forget that you struck me.”
Paul cleared his throat, said: “We were speaking of the throne, Majesty.”
The Emperor whirled, glared at Paul. “I sit on the throne!” he barked.
“You shall have a throne on Salusa Secundus,” Paul said.
“I put down my arms and came here on your word of bond!” the Emperor shouted. “You dare threaten—”
“Your person is safe in my presence,” Paul said. “An Atreides promised it. Muad’Dib, however, sentences you to your prison planet. But have no fear, Majesty. I will ease the harshness of the place with all the powers at my disposal. It shall become a garden world, full of gentle things.”
As the hidden import of Paul’s words grew in the Emperor’s mind, he glared across the room at Paul. “Now we see true motives,” he sneered.
“Indeed,” Paul said.
“And what of Arrakis?” the Emperor asked. “Another garden world full of gentle things?”
“The Fremen have the word of Muad‘Dib,” Paul said. “There will be flowing water here open to the sky and green oases rich with good things. But we have the spice to think of, too. Thus, there will always be desert on Arrakis ... and fierce winds, and trials to toughen a man. We Fremen have a saying: ‘God created Arrakis to train the faithful.’ One cannot go against the word of God.”
The old Truthsayer, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, had her own view of the hidden meaning in Paul’s words now. She glimpsed the jihad and said: “You cannot loose these people upon the universe!”
“You will think back to the gentle ways of the Sardaukar!” Paul snapped.
“You cannot,” she whispered.
“You’re a Truthsayer,” Paul said. “Review your words.” He glanced at the Princess Royal, back to the Emperor. “Best be done quickly, Majesty.”
The Emperor turned a stricken look upon his daughter. She touched his arm, spoke soothingly: “For this I was trained, Father.”
He took a deep breath.
“You cannot stay this thing,” the old Truthsayer muttered.
The Emperor straightened, standing stiffly with a look of remembered dignity. “Who will negotiate for you, kinsman?” he asked.
Paul turned, saw his mother, her eyes heavy-lidded, standing with Chani in a squad of Fedaykin guards. He crossed to them, stood looking down at Chani.
“I know the reasons,” Chani whispered. “If it must be... Usul.”
Paul, hearing the secret tears in her voice, touched her cheek. “My Sihaya need fear nothing, ever,” he whispered. He dropped his arm, faced his mother. “You will negotiate for me, Mother, with Chani by your side. She has wisdom and sharp eyes. And it is wisely said that no one bargains tougher than a Fremen. She will be looking through the eyes of her love for me and with the thought of her sons to be, what they will need. Listen to her.”
Jessica sensed the harsh calculation in her son, put down a shudder. “What are your instructions?” she asked.
“The Emperor’s entire CHOAM Company holdings as dowry,” he said.
“Entire?” She was shocked almost speechless.
“He is to be stripped. I’ll want an earldom and CHOAM directorship for Gurney Halleck, and him in the fief of Caladan. There will be titles and attendant power for every surviving Atreides man, not excepting the lowliest trooper.”
“What of the Fremen?” Jessica asked.
“The Fremen are mine,” Paul said. “What they receive shall be dispensed by Muad’Dib. It’ll begin with Stilgar as Governor on Arrakis, but that can wait.”
“And for me?” Jessica asked.
“Is there something you wish?”
“Perhaps Caladan,” she said, looking at Gurney. “I’m not certain. I’ve become too much the Fremen ... and the Reverend Mother. I need a time of peace and stillness in which to think.”
“That you shall have,” Paul said, “and anything else that Gurney or I can give you.”
Jessica nodded, feeling suddenly old and tired. She looked at Chani. “And for the royal concubine?”
“No title for me,” Chani whispered. “Nothing. I beg of you.”
Paul stared down into her eyes, remembering her suddenly as she had stood once with little Leto in her arms, their child now dead in this violence. “I swear to you now,” he whispered, “that you’ll need no title. That woman over there will be my wife and you but a concubine because this is a political thing and we must weld peace out of this moment, enlist the Great Houses of the Landsraad. We must obey the forms. Yet that princess shall have no more of me than my name. No child of mine nor touch nor softness of glance, nor instant of desire.”
“So you say now,” Chani said. She glanced across the room at the tall p
rincess.
“Do you know so little of my son?” Jessica whispered. “See that princess standing there, so haughty and confident. They say she has pretensions of a literary nature. Let us hope she finds solace in such things; she’ll have little else.” A bitter laugh escaped Jessica. “Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she’ll live as less than a concubine—never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she’s bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives.”
APPENDIXES
Appendix I: The Ecology of Dune
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
—Pardot Kynes, First Planetologist of Arrakis
THE EFFECT of Arrakis on the mind of the newcomer usually is that of overpowering barren land. The stranger might think nothing could live or grow in the open here, that this was the true wasteland that had never been fertile and never would be.
To Pardot Kynes, the planet was merely an expression of energy, a machine being driven by its sun. What it needed was reshaping to fit it to man’s needs. His mind went directly to the free-moving human population, the Fremen. What a challenge! What a tool they could be! Fremen: an ecological and geological force of almost unlimited potential.
A direct and simple man in many ways, Pardot Kynes. One must evade Harkonnen restrictions? Excellent. Then one marries a Fremen woman. When she gives you a Fremen son, you begin with him, with Liet-Kynes, and the other children, teaching them ecological literacy, creating a new language with symbols that arm the mind to manipulate an entire landscape, its climate, seasonal limits, and finally to break through all ideas of force into the dazzling awareness of order.
“There’s an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet,” Kynes said. “You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple: to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system’s capacity to sustain life. Life—all life—is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.”
This was Pardot Kynes lecturing to a sietch warren class.
Before the lectures, though, he had to convince the Fremen. To understand how this came about, you must first understand the enormous single-mindedness, the innocence with which he approached any problem. He was not naive, he merely permitted himself no distractions.
He was exploring the Arrakis landscape in a one-man groundcar one hot afternoon when he stumbled onto a deplorably common scene. Six Harkonnen bravos, shielded and fully armed, had trapped three Fremen youths in the open behind the Shield Wall near the village of Windsack. To Kynes, it was a ding-dong battle, more slapstick then real, until he focused on the fact that the Harkonnens intended to kill the Fremen. By this time, one of the youths was down with a severed artery, two of the bravos were down as well, but it was still four armed men against two striplings.
Kynes wasn’t brave; he merely had that single-mindedness and caution. The Harkonnens were killing Fremen. They were destroying the tools with which he intended to remake a planet! He triggered his own shield, waded in and had two of the Harkonnens dead with a slip-tip before they knew anyone was behind them. He dodged a sword thrust from one of the others, slit the man’s throat with a neat entrisseur, and left the lone remaining bravo to the two Fremen youths, turning his full attention to saving the lad on the ground. And save the lad he did... while the sixth Harkonnen was being dispatched.
Now here was a pretty kettle of sandtrout! The Fremen didn’t know what to make of Kynes. They knew who he was, of course. No man arrived on Arrakis without a full dossier finding its way into the Fremen strongholds. They knew him: he was an Imperial servant.
But he killed Harkonnens!
Adults might have shrugged and, with some regret, sent his shade to join those of the six dead men on the ground. But these Fremen were inexperienced youths and all they could see was that they owed this Imperial servant a mortal obligation.
Kynes wound up two days later in a sietch that looked down on Wind Pass. To him, it was all very natural. He talked to the Fremen about water, about dunes anchored by grass, about palmaries filled with date palms, about open qanats flowing across the desert. He talked and talked and talked.
All around him raged a debate that Kynes never saw. What to do with this madman? He knew the location of a major sietch. What to do? What of his words, this mad talk about a paradise on Arrakis? Just talk. He knows too much. But he killed Harkonnens! What of the water burden? When did we owe the Imperium anything? He killed Harkonnens. Anyone can kill Harkonnens. I have done it myself.
But what of this talk about the flowering of Arrakis?
Very simple: Where is the water for this?
He says it is here! And he did save three of ours.
He saved three fools who had put themselves in the way of the Harkonnen fist! And he has seen crysknives!
The necessary decision was known for hours before it was voiced. The tau of a sietch tells its members what they must do; even the most brutal necessity is known. An experienced fighter was sent with a consecrated knife to do the job. Two watermen followed him to get the water from the body. Brutal necessity.
It’s doubtful that Kynes even focused on his would-be executioner. He was talking to a group that spread around him at a cautious distance. He walked as he talked: a short circle, gesturing. Open water, Kynes said. Walk in the open without stillsuits. Water for dipping it out of a pond! Portyguls!
The knifeman confronted him.
“Remove yourself,” Kynes said, and went on talking about secret windtraps. He brushed past the man. Kynes’ back stood open for the ceremonial blow.
What went on in that would-be executioner’s mind cannot be known now. Did he finally listen to Kynes and believe? Who knows? But what he did is a matter of record. Uliet was his name, Older Liet. Uliet walked three paces and deliberately fell on his own knife, thus “removing” himself. Suicide? Some say Shai-hulud moved him.
Talk about omens!
From that instant, Kynes had but to point, saying “Go there.” Entire Fremen tribes went. Men died, women died, children died. But they went.
Kynes returned to his Imperial chores, directing the Biological Testing Stations. And now, Fremen began to appear among the Station personnel. The Fremen looked at each other. They were infiltrating the “system,” a possibility they’d never considered. Station tools began finding their way into the sietch warrens—especially cutterays which were used to dig underground catchbasins and hidden windtraps.
Water began collecting in the basins.
It became apparent to the Fremen that Kynes was not a madman totally, just mad enough to be holy. He was one of the umma, the brotherhood of prophets. The shade of Uliet was advanced to the sadus, the throng of heavenly judges.
Kynes—direct, savagely intent Kynes—knew that highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new. He set up small-unit experiments with regular interchange of data for a swift Tansley effect, let each group find its own path. They must accumulate millions of tiny facts. He organized only isolated and rough run-through tests to put their difficulties into perspective.
Core samplings were made throughout the bled. Charts were developed on the long drifts of weather that are called climate. He found that in the wide belt contained by the 70-degree lines, north and south, temperatures for thousands of years hadn’t gone outside the 254-332 degrees (absolute) range, and that this belt had long growing seasons where temperatures ranged f
rom 284 to 302 degrees absolute: the “bonanza” range for terraform life ... once they solved the water problem.
When will we solve it? the Fremen asked. When will we see Arrakis as a paradise?
In the manner of a teacher answering a child who has asked the sum of 2 plus 2, Kynes told them: “From three hundred to five hundred years.”
A lesser folk might have howled in dismay. But the Fremen had learned patience from men with whips. It was a bit longer than they had anticipated, but they all could see that the blessed day was coming. They tightened their sashes and went back to work. Somehow, the disappointment made the prospect of paradise more real.
The concern on Arrakis was not with water, but with moisture. Pets were almost unknown, stock animals rare. Some smugglers employed the domesticated desert ass, the kulon, but the water price was high even when the beasts were fitted with modified stillsuits.
Kynes thought of installing reduction plants to recover water from the hydrogen and oxygen locked in native rock, but the energy-cost factor was far too high. The polar caps (disregarding the false sense of water security they gave the pyons) held far too small an amount for his project ... and he already suspected where the water had to be. There was that consistent increase of moisture at median altitudes, and in certain winds. There was that primary clue in the air balance—23 per cent oxygen, 75.4 per cent nitrogen and .023 per cent carbon dioxide—with the trace gases taking up the rest.
There was a rare native root plant that grew above the 2,500-meter level in the northern temperate zone. A tuber two meters long yielded half a liter of water. And there were the terraform desert plants: the tougher ones showed signs of thriving if planted in depressions lined with dew precipitators.
Then Kynes saw the salt pan.
His ’thopter, flying between stations far out on the bled, was blown off course by a storm. When the storm passed, there was the pan—a giant oval depression some three hundred kilometers on the long axis—a glaring white surprise in the open desert. Kynes landed, tasted the pan’s storm-cleaned surface.
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