Dune (34 page)

He remembered once seeing a gauze kerchief blowing in the wind and now he sensed the future as though it twisted across some surface as undulant and impermanent as that of the windblown kerchief.

He saw people.

He felt the heat and cold of uncounted probabilities.

He knew names and places, experienced emotions without number, reviewed data of innumerable unexplored crannies. There was time to probe and test and taste, but no time to shape.

The thing was a spectrum of possibilities from the most remote past to the most remote future—from the most probable to the most improbable. He saw his own death in countless ways. He saw new planets, new cultures.

People.

People.

He saw them in such swarms they could not be listed, yet his mind catalogued them.

Even the Guildsmen.

And he thought:
The Guild-there'd be a way for us, my strangeness accepted as a familiar thing of high value, always with an assured supply of the now-necessary spice.

But the idea of living out his life in the mind-groping-ahead-through-possible-futures that guided hurtling spaceships appalled him. It was a way, though. And in meeting the
possible future
that contained Guildsmen he recognized his own strangeness.

The awareness conveyed both reassurance and alarm—so many places on that other kind of terrain dipped or turned out of his sight.

As swiftly as it had come, the sensation slipped away from him, and he realized the entire experience had taken the space of a heartbeat.

Yet, his own personal awareness had been turned over, illuminated in a terrifying way. He stared around him.

Night still covered the stilltent within its rock-enclosed hideaway. His mother's grief could still be heard.

His own lack of grief could still be felt . . . that hollow place somewhere separated from his mind, which went on in its steady pace—dealing with data, evaluating, computing, submitting answers in something like the Mentat way.

And now he saw that he had a wealth of data few such minds ever before had encompassed. But this made the empty place within him no easier to bear. He felt that something must shatter. It was as though a clockwork control for a bomb had been set to ticking within him. It went on about its business no matter what he wanted. It recorded minuscule shadings of difference around him—a slight change in moisture, a fractional fall in temperature, the progress of an insect across their stilltent roof, the solemn approach of dawn in the starlighted patch of sky he could see out the tent's transparent end.

The emptiness was unbearable. Knowing how the clockwork had been set in motion made no difference. He could look to his own past and see the start of it—the training, the sharpening of talents, the refined pressures of sophisticated disciplines, even exposure to the O.C. Bible at a critical moment . . . and, lastly, the heavy intake of spice. And he could look ahead—the most terrifying direction—to see where it all pointed.

I'm a monster!
he thought.
A freak!

“No,” he said. Then: “No. No! NO!”

He found that he was pounding the tent floor with his fists. (The implacable part of him recorded this as an interesting emotional datum and fed it into computation.)

“Paul!”

His mother was beside him, holding his hands, her face a gray blob peering at him. “Paul, what's wrong?”

“You!” he said.

“I'm here, Paul,” she said. “It's all right.”

“What have you done to me?” he demanded.

In a burst of clarity, she sensed some of the roots in the question, said: “I gave birth to you.”

It was, from instinct as much as her own subtle knowledge, the precisely correct answer to calm him. He felt her hands holding him, focused on the dim outline of her face. (Certain gene traces in her facial structure were noted in the new way by his onflowing mind, the clues added to other data, and a final-summation answer put forward.)

“Let go of me,” he said.

She heard the iron in his voice, obeyed. “Do you want to tell me what's wrong, Paul?”

“Did you know what you were doing when you trained me?” he asked.

There's no more childhood in his voice,
she thought. And she said: “I hoped the thing any parent hopes—that you'd be . . . superior, different.”

“Different?”

She heard the bitterness in his tone, said: “Paul, I—”

“You didn't want a son!” he said. “You wanted a Kwisatz Haderach! You wanted a male Bene Gesserit!”

She recoiled from his bitterness. “But Paul. . . .”

“Did you ever consult my father in this?”

She spoke gently out of the freshness of her grief: “Whatever you are, Paul, the heredity is as much your father as me.”

“But not the training,” he said. “Not the things that. . . awakened . . . the sleeper.”

“Sleeper?”

“It's here.” He put a hand to his head and then to his breast. “In me. It goes on and on and on and or. and—”

“Paul!”

She had heard the hysteria edging his voice.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You wanted the Reverend Mother to hear about my dreams: You listen in her place now. I've just had a waking dream. Do you know why?”

“You must calm yourself,” she said. “If there's—”

“The spice,” he said. “It's in everything here—the air, the soil, the food, the
geriatric
spice. It's like the Truthsayer drug. It's a poison!”

She stiffened.

His voice lowered and he repeated: “A poison—so subtle, so insidious . . . so irreversible. It won't even kill you unless you stop taking it. We can't leave Arrakis unless we take part of Arrakis with us.”

The terrifying
presence
of his voice brooked no dispute.

“You and the spice,” Paul said. “The spice changes anyone who gets this much of it, but thanks to
you,
I could bring the change to consciousness. I don't get to leave it in the unconscious where its disturbance can be blanked out. I can see it.”

“Paul, you—”

“I
see
it!” he repeated.

She heard madness in his voice, didn't know what to do.

But he spoke again, and she heard the iron control return to him: “We're trapped here.”

We're trapped here,
she agreed.

And she accepted the truth of his words. No pressure of the Bene Gesserit, no trickery or artifice could pry them completely free from Arrakis: the spice was addictive. Her body had known the fact long before her mind awakened to it.

So here we live out our lives,
she thought,
on this hell-planet. The place is prepared for us, if we can evade the Harkonnens. And there's no doubt of my course: a broodmare preserving an important bloodline for the Bene Gesserit Plan.

“I must tell you about my waking dream,” Paul said. (Now there was fury in his voice.) “To be sure you accept what I say, I'll tell you first I know you'll bear a daughter, my sister, here on Arrakis.”

Jessica placed her hands against the tent floor, pressed back against the curving fabric wall to still a pang of fear. She knew her pregnancy could not show yet. Only her own Bene Gesserit training had allowed her to read the first faint signals of her body, to know of the embryo only a few weeks old.

“Only to serve,” Jessica whispered, clinging to the Bene Gesserit motto. “We exist only to serve.”

“We'll find a home among the Fremen,” Paul said, “where your Missionaria Protectiva has bought us a bolt hole.”

They've prepared a way for us in the desert,
Jessica told herself.
But how can he know of the Missionaria Protectiva?
She found it increasingly difficult to subdue her terror at the overpowering strangeness in Paul.

He studied the dark shadow of her, seeing her fear and every reaction with his new awareness as though she were outlined in blinding light. A beginning of compassion for her crept over him.

“The things that can happen here, I cannot begin to tell you,” he said. “I cannot even begin to tell myself, although I've seen them. This
sense
of the future—I seem to have no control over it. The thing just happens. The immediate future—say, a year—I can see some of that. . . a
road
as broad as our Central Avenue on Caladan. Some places I don't see . . . shadowed places. . . as though it went behind a hill” (and again he thought of the surface of a blowing kerchief) and there are branchings. . . .”

He fell silent as memory of that
seeing
filled him. No prescient dream, no experience of his life had quite prepared him for the totality with which the veils had been ripped away to reveal naked time.

Recalling the experience, he recognized his own terrible purpose —the pressure of his life spreading outward like an expanding bubble . . . time retreating before it. . . .

Jessica found the tent's glowtab control, activated it.

Dim green light drove back the shadows, easing her fear. She looked at Paul's face, his eyes—the inward stare. And she knew where she had seen such a look before: pictured in records of disasters—on the faces of children who experienced starvation or terrible injury. The eyes were like pits, mouth a straight line, cheeks indrawn.

It's the look of terrible awareness,
she thought,
of someone forced to the knowledge of his own mortality.

He was, indeed, no longer a child.

The underlying import of his words began to take over in her mind, pushing all else aside. Paul could see ahead, a way of escape for them.

“There's a way to evade the Harkonnens,” she said.

“The Harkonnens!” he sneered. “Put those twisted humans out of your mind.” He stared at his mother, studying the lines of her face in the light of the glowtab. The lines betrayed her.

She said: “You shouldn't refer to people as humans without—”

“Don't be so sure you know where to draw the line,” he said. “We carry our past with us. And, mother mine, there's a thing you don't know and should—
we
are Harkonnens.”

Her mind did a terrifying thing: it blanked out as though it needed to shut off all sensation. But Paul's voice went on at that implacable pace, dragging her with it.

“When next you find a mirror, study your face—study mine now. The traces are there if you don't blind yourself. Look at my hands, the set of my bones. And if none of this convinces you, then take my word for it. I've walked the future, I've looked at a record, I've seen a place, I have all the data. We're Harkonnens.”

“A . . . renegade branch of the family,” she said. “That's it, isn't it? Some Harkonnen cousin who—”

“You're the Baron's own daughter,” he said, and watched the way she pressed her hands to her mouth. “The Baron sampled many pleasures in his youth, and once permitted himself to be seduced. But it was for the genetic purposes of the Bene Gesserit, by one of
you
.”

The way he said
you
struck her like a slap. But it set her mind to working and she could not deny his words. So many blank ends of meaning in her past reached out now and linked. The daughter the Bene Gesserit wanted—it wasn't to end the old Atreides-Harkonnen feud, but to fix some genetic factor in their lines.
What?
She groped for an answer.

As though he saw inside her mind, Paul said: “They thought they were reaching for me. But I'm not what they expected, and I've arrived before my time. And
they
don't know it.”

Jessica pressed her hands to her mouth.

She felt exposed and naked before him, realizing then that he saw her with eyes from which little could be hidden. And
that,
she knew, was the basis of her fear.

“You're thinking I'm the Kwisatz Haderach,” he said. “Put that out of your mind. I'm something unexpected.”

I must get word out to one of the schools,
she thought.
The mating index may show what has happened.

“They won't learn about me until it's too late,” he said.

She sought to divert him, lowered her hands and said: “We'll find a place among the Fremen?”

“The Fremen have a saying they credit to Shai-hulud, Old Father Eternity,” he said. “They say: ‘Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.' ”

And he thought:
Yes, mother mine—among the Fremen. You'll acquire the blue eyes and a callus beside your lovely nose from the filter tube to your stillsuit . . .
and you'll bear my sister: St. Alia of the Knife.

“If you're not the Kwisatz Haderach,” Jessica said, “what—”

“You couldn't possibly know,” he said. “You won't believe it until you see it.”

And he thought:
I'm a seed.

He suddenly saw how fertile was the ground into which he had fallen, and with this realization, the terrible purpose filled him, creeping through the empty place within, threatening to choke him with grief.

He had seen two main branchings along the way ahead—in one he confronted an evil old Baron and said: “Hello, Grandfather.” The thought of that path and what lay along it sickened him.

The other path held long patches of grey obscurity except for peaks of violence. He had seen a warrior religion there, a fire spreading across the universe with the Atreides green and black banner waving at the head of fanatic legions drunk on spice liquor. Gurney Halleck and a few others of his father's men—a pitiful few—were among them, all marked by the hawk symbol from the shrine of his father's skull.