Dune

Hawat studied the fat round face across from him. Slowly the old soldier-spy began to nod his head. “Feyd-Rautha,” he said. “So that’s the reason for the oppression now. You’re very devious yourself, Baron. Perhaps we can incorporate these two schemes. Yes. Your Feyd-Rautha can go to Arrakis as their savior. He can win the populace. Yes.”

The Baron smiled. And behind his smile, he asked himself: Now, how does this fit in with Hawat’s personal scheming?

And Hawat, seeing that he was dismissed, arose and left the red-walled room. As he walked, he could not put down the disturbing unknowns that cropped into every computation about Arrakis. This new religious leader that Gurney Halleck hinted at from his hiding place among the smugglers, this Muad’Dib.

Perhaps I should not have told the Baron to let this religion flourish where it will, even among the folk of pan and graben, he told himself. But it’s well known that repression makes a religion flourish.

And he thought about Halleck’s reports on Fremen battle tactics. The tactics smacked of Halleck himself… and Idaho… and even of Hawat.

Did Idaho survive? he asked himself.

But this was a futile question. He did not yet ask himself if it was possible that Paul had survived. He knew the Baron was convinced that all Atreides were dead. The Bene Gesserit witch had been his weapon, the Baron admitted. And that could only mean an end to all—even to the woman’s own son.

What a poisonous hate she must’ve had for the Atreides, he thought. Something like the hate I hold for this Baron. Will my blow be as final and complete as hers?

***

There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace—those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.

—from “The Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan

PAUL-MUAD’DIB remembered that there had been a meal heavy with spice essence. He clung to this memory because it was an anchor point and he could tell himself from this vantage that his immediate experience must be a dream.

I am a theater of processes, he told himself. I am a prey to the imperfect vision, to the race consciousness and its terrible purpose.

Yet, he could not escape the fear that he had somehow overrun himself, lost his position in time, so that past and future and present mingled without distinction. It was a kind of visual fatigue and it came, he knew, from the constant necessity of holding the prescient future as a kind of memory that was in itself a thing intrinsically of the past.

Chani prepared the meal forme, he told himself.

Yet Chani was deep in the south—in the cold country where the sun was hot—secreted in one of the new sietch strongholds, safe with their son, Leto II.

Or, was that a thing yet to happen?

No, he reassured himself, for Alia-the-Strange-One, his sister, had gone there with his mother and with Chani—a twenty-thumper trip into the south, riding a Reverend Mother’s palanquin fixed to the back of a wild maker.

He shied away from the thought of riding the giant worms, asking himself: Or is Alia yet to be born?

I was on razzia, Paul recalled. We went raiding to recover the water of our dead in Arrakeen. And I found the remains of my father in the funeral pyre. I enshrined the skull of my father in a Fremen rock mound overlooking Harg Pass.

Or was that a thing yet to be?

My wounds are real, Paul told himself. My scars are real. The shrine of my father’s skull is real.

Still in the dreamlike state, Paul remembered that Harah, Jamis’ wife, had intruded on him once to say there’d been a fight in the sietch corridor. That had been the interim sietch before the women and children had been sent into the deep south. Harah had stood there in the entrance to the inner chamber, the black wings of her hair tied back by water rings on a chain. She had held aside the chamber’s hangings and told him that Chani had just killed someone.

This happened, Paul told himself. This was real, not born out of its time and subject to change.

Paul remembered he had rushed out to find Chani standing beneath the yellow globes of the corridor, clad in a brilliant blue wraparound robe with hood thrown back, a flush of exertion on her elfin features. She had been sheathing her crysknife. A huddled group had been hurrying away down the corridor with a burden.

And Paul remembered telling himself: You always know when they’re carrying a body.

Chani’s water rings, worn openly in sietch on a cord around her neck, tinkled as she turned toward him.

“Chani, what is this?” he asked.

“I dispatched one who came to challenge you in single combat, Usul.”

“You killed him?”

“Yes. But perhaps I should’ve left him for Harah.”

(And Paul recalled how the faces of the people around them had showed appreciation for these words. Even Harah had laughed.)

“But he came to challenge me!”

“You trained me yourself in the weirding way, Usul.”

“Certainly! But you shouldn’t—”

“I was born in the desert, Usul. I know how to use a crysknife.”

He suppressed his anger, tried to talk reasonably. “This may all be true, Chani, but—”

“I am no longer a child hunting scorpions in the sietch by the light of a handglobe, Usul. I do not play games.”

Paul glared at her, caught by the odd ferocity beneath her casual attitude.

“He was not worthy, Usul,” Chani said. “I’d not disturb your meditations with the likes of him.” She moved closer, looking at him out of the corners of her eyes, dropping her voice so that only he might hear. “And, beloved, when it’s learned that a challenger may face me and be brought to shameful death by Muad’Dib’s woman, there’ll be fewer challengers.”

Yes, Paul told himself, that had certainly happened. It was true-past. And the number of challengers testing the new blade of Muad’Dib did drop dramatically.

Somewhere, in a world not-of-the-dream, there was a hint of motion, the cry of a nightbird.

I dream, Paul reassured himself. It’s the spice meal.

Still, there was about him a feeling of abandonment. He wondered if it might be possible that his ruh-spirit had slipped over somehow into the world where the Fremen believed he had his true existence—into the alam al-mithal, the world of similitudes, that metaphysical realm where all physical limitations were removed. And he knew fear at the thought of such a place, because removal of all limitations meant removal of all points of reference. In the landscape of a myth he could not orient himself and say: “I am I because I am here.”