Dune

her touching him. He settled down right away and was happy. I was ….” Harah shrugged.

“It’s the strangeness of my daughter, is that it?” Jessica asked. “It’s the way she speaks of things beyond her years and of things no child her age could know—things of the past.”

“How could she know what a child looked like on Bela Tegeuse?” Harah demanded.

“But he does!” Alia said, “Subiay’s boy looks just like the son of Mitha born before the parting.”

“Alia!” Jessica said. “I warned you.”

“But, Mother, I saw it and it was true and ….”

Jessica shook her head, seeing the signs of disturbance in Harah’s face. What have I borne? Jessica asked herself. A daughter who knew at birth everything that I knew … and more: everything revealed to her out of the corridors of the past by the Reverend Mothers within me.

“It’s not just the things she says,” Harah said. “It’s the exercises, too: the way she sits and stares at a rock, moving only one muscle beside her nose, or a muscle on the back of a finger, or—”

“Those are the Bene Gesserit training,” Jessica said. “You know that, Harah. Would you deny my daughter her inheritance?”

“Reverend Mother, you know these things don’t matter to me,” Harah said. “It’s the people and the way they mutter. I feel danger in it. They say your daughter’s a demon, that other children refuse to play with her, that she’s—”

“She has so little in common with the other children,” Jessica said. “She’s no demon. It’s just the—”

“Of course she’s not!”

Jessica found herself surprised at the vehemence in Harah’s tone, glanced down at Alia. The child appeared lost in thought, radiating a sense of … waiting. Jessica returned her attention to Harah.

“I respect the fact that you’re a member of my son’s household,” Jessica said. (Alia stirred against her hand.) “You may speak openly with me of whatever’s troubling you.”

“I will not be a member of your son’s household much longer,” Harah said. “I’ve waited this long for the sake of my sons, the special training they receive as the children of Usul. It’s little enough I could give them since it’s known I don’t share your son’s bed.”

Again Alia stirred beside her, half-sleeping, warm.

“You’d have made a good companion for my son, though,” Jessica said. And she added to herself because such thoughts were ever with her: Companion … not a wife. Jessica’s thoughts went then straight to the center, to the pang that came from the common talk in the sietch that her son’s companionship with Chani had become a permanent thing, the marriage.

I love Chani, Jessica thought, but she reminded herself that love might have to step aside for royal necessity. Royal marriages had other reasons than love.

“You think I don’t know what you plan for your son?” Harah asked.

“What do you mean?” Jessica demanded.

“You plan to unite the tribes under Him,” Harah said.

“Is that bad?”

“I see danger for him … and Alia is part of that danger.”

Alia nestled closer to her mother, eyes opened now and studying Harah.

“I’ve watched you two together,” Harah said, “the way you touch. And Alia is like my own flesh because she’s sister to one who is like my brother. I’ve watched over her and guarded her from the time she was a mere baby, from the time of the razzia when we fled here. I’ve seen many things about her.”

Jessica nodded, feeling disquiet begin to grow in Alia beside her.

“You know what I mean,” Harah said. “The way she knew from the first what we were saying to her. When has there been another baby who knew the water discipline so young? What other baby’s first words to her nurse were: ‘I love you, Harah’?”

Harah stared at Alia. “Why do you think I accept her insults? I know there’s no malice in them.”

Alia looked up at her mother.

“Yes, I have reasoning powers, Reverend Mother,” Harah said. “I could have been of the Sayyadina. I have seen what I have seen.”

“Harah….” Jessica shrugged. “I don’t know what to say.” And she felt surprise at herself, because this literally was true.

Alia straightened, squared her shoulders. Jessica felt the sense of waiting ended, an emotion compounded of decision and sadness.

“We made a mistake,” Alia said. “Now we need Harah.”

“It was the ceremony of the seed,” Harah said, “when you changed the Water of Life, Reverend Mother, when Alia was yet unborn within you.”

Need Harah? Jessica asked herself.

“Who else can talk among the people and make them begin to understand me?” Alia asked.

“What would you have her do?” Jessica asked.

“She already knows what to do,” Alia said.

“I will tell them the truth,” Harah said. Her face seemed suddenly old and sad with its olive skin drawn into frown wrinkles, a witchery in the sharp features. “I will tell them that Alia only pretends to be a little girl, that she has never been a little girl.”

Alia shook her head. Tears ran down her cheeks, and Jessica felt the wave of sadness from her daughter as though the emotion were her own.

“I know I’m a freak,” Alia whispered. The adult summation coming from the child mouth was like a bitter confirmation.

“You’re not a freak!” Harah snapped. “Who dared say you’re a freak?”

Again, Jessica marveled at the fierce note of protectiveness in Harah’s voice. Jessica saw then that Alia had judged correctly—they did need Harah. The tribe would understand Harah—both her words and her emotions—for it was obvious she loved Alia as though this were her own child.

“Who said it?” Harah repeated.

“Nobody.”

Alia used a corner of Jessica’s aba to wipe the tears from her face. She smoothed the robe where she had dampened and crumpled it.

“Then don’t you say it,” Harah ordered.

“Yes, Harah.”

“Now,” Harah said, “you may tell me what it was like so that I may tell the others. Tell me what it is that happened to you.”

Alia swallowed, looked up at her mother.

Jessica nodded.

“One day I woke up,” Alia said. “It was like waking from sleep except that I could not remember going to sleep. I was in a warm, dark place. And I was frightened.”

Listening to the half-lisping voice of her daughter, Jessica remembered that day in the big cavern.

“When I was frightened,” Alia said, “I tried to escape, but there was no way to escape. Then I saw a spark … but it wasn’t exactly like seeing it. The spark was just there with me and I felt the spark’s emotions … soothing me, comforting me, telling me that way that everything would be all right. That was my mother.”

Harah rubbed at her eyes, smiled reassuringly at Alia. Yet there was a look of wildness in the eyes of the Fremen woman, an intensity as though they, too, were trying to hear Alia’s words.

And Jessica thought: What do we really know of how such a one thinks … out of her unique experiences and training and ancestry?

“Just when I felt safe and reassured,” Alia said, “there was another spark with us … and everything was happening at once. The other spark was the old Reverend Mother. She was … trading lives with my mother … everything … and I was there with them, seeing it all … everything. And it was over, and I was them and all the others and myself … only it took me a long time to find myself again. There were so many others.”

“It was a cruel thing,” Jessica said. “No being should wake into consciousness thus. The wonder of it is you could accept all that happened to you.”