darkness. And one light off to their left grew brighter, began to wink back at the cliff—very fast: blinksquirt, glimmer, blink!
And it was gone.
The false star in the cliff winked out immediately.
Signals … and they filled her with premonition.
The answer was obvious: the communinet was certain to be tapped now by agents of the Duke Leto. Light signals could only mean that messages were being sent between his enemies—between Harkonnen agents.
There came a tapping at the door behind them and the voice of Hawat’s man: “All clear, sir .. m‘Lady. Time to be getting the young master to his father.”
***
It is said that the Duke Leto blinded himself to the perils of Arrakis, that he walked heedlessly into the pit. Would it not be more likely to suggest he had lived so long in the presence of extreme danger he misjudged a change in its intensity? Or is it possible he deliberately sacrificed himself that his son might find a better life? All evidence indicates the Duke was a man not easily hoodwinked.
THE DUKE Leto Atreides leaned against a parapet of the landing control tower outside Arrakeen. The night’s first moon, an oblate silver coin, hung well above the southern horizon. Beneath it, the jagged cliffs of the Shield Wall shone like parched icing through a dust haze. To his left, the lights of Arrakeen glowed in the haze—yellow … white … blue.
He thought of the notices posted now above his signature all through the populous places of the planet: “Our Sublime Padishah Emperor has charged me to take possession of this planet and end all dispute.”
The ritualistic formality of it touched him with a feeling of loneliness.
The rage was difficult to suppress.
He saw lights of a moving vehicle coming toward the landing field from Arrakeen. He hoped it was the guard and troop carrier bringing Paul. The delay was galling even though he knew it was prompted by caution on the part of Hawat’s lieutenant.
He shook his head to drive out the angry thoughts, glanced back at the field where five of his own frigates were posted around the rim like monolithic sentries.
The lieutenant was a good one, he reminded himself. A man marked for advancement,
If the people of this decadent garrison city could only see the Emperor’s private note to his “Noble Duke”— the disdainful allusions to veiled men and women: “… but what else is one to expect of barbarians whose dearest dream is to live outside the ordered security of the faufreluches?”
The Duke felt in this moment that his own dearest dream was to end all class distinctions and never again think of deadly order. He looked up and out of the dust at the unwinking stars, thought:
A wave of self-pity, immediately despised and rejected, swept through him, and for some reason he found himself recalling two lines from a poem Gurney Halleck often repeated—
Well, Gurney would find plenty of falling sands here, the Duke thought. The central wastelands beyond those moon-frosted cliffs were desert—barren rock, dunes, and blowing dust, an uncharted dry wilderness with here and there along its rim and perhaps scattered through it, knots of Fremen. If anything could buy a future for the Atreides line, the Fremen just might do it.
Provided the Harkonnens hadn’t managed to infect even the Fremen with their poisonous schemes.
A scraping metal racket vibrated through the tower, shook the parapet beneath his arms. Blast shutters dropped in front of him, blocking the view.
The men were already boiling in from the field when he reached the yellow-domed room. They carried their spacebags over their shoulders, shouting and roistering like students returning from vacation.
“Hey! Feel that under your dogs? That’s gravity, man!” “How many G’s does this place pull? Feels heavy.” “Nine-tenths of a G by the book.”
The crossfire of thrown words filled the big room.
“Did you get a good look at this hole on the way down? Where’s all the loot this place’s supposed to have?” “The Harkonnens took it with ’em!” “Me for a hot shower and a soft bed!” “Haven’t you heard, stupid? No showers down here. You scrub your ass with sand!” “Hey! Can it! The Duke!”
The Duke stepped out of the stair entry into a suddenly silent room. Gurney Halleck strode along at the point of the crowd, bag over one shoulder, the neck of his nine-string baliset clutched in the other hand. They were long-fingered hands with big thumbs, full of tiny movements that drew such delicate music from the baliset.
The Duke watched Halleck, admiring the ugly lump of a man, noting the glass-splinter eyes with their gleam of savage understanding. Here was a man who lived outside the faufreluches while obeying their every precept. What was it Paul had called him?
Halleck’s wispy blond hair trailed across barren spots on his head. His wide mouth was twisted into a pleasant sneer, and the scar of the inkvine whip slashed across his jawline seemed to move with a life of its own. His whole air was of casual, shoulder-set capability. He came up to the Duke, bowed.
“Gurney,” Leto said.
“My Lord.” He gestured with the baliset toward the men in the room. “This is the last of them. I’d have preferred coming in with the first wave, but….”
“There are still some Harkonnens for you,” the Duke said. “Step aside with me, Gurney, where we may talk.”
