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“The gom jabbar, the high-handed enemy. It’s a needle with a drop of poison on its tip. Ah-ah! Don’t pull away or you’ll feel that poison.”
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” “‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’” Paul quoted. “Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible,” she said.
“The drug’s dangerous,” she said, “but it gives insight. When a Truthsayer’s gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory—in her body’s memory. We look down so many avenues of the past…but only feminine avenues.” Her voice took on a note of sadness. “Yet, there’s a place where no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot—into both feminine and masculine pasts.” “Your Kwisatz Haderach?”
Paul snapped the force button at his waist, felt the crinkled-skin tingling of the defensive field at his forehead and down his back, heard external sounds take on characteristic shield-filtered flatness. “In shield fighting, one moves fast on defense, slow on attack,”
Jessica spoke, shattering the moment. “Besides, Wellington, the Duke is really two men. One of them I love very much. He’s charming, witty, considerate…tender—everything a woman could desire. But the other man is…cold, callous, demanding, selfish—as harsh and cruel as a winter wind. That’s the man shaped by the father.” Her face contorted. “If only that old man had died when my Duke was born!”
Halleck was a continual amazement—a head full of songs, quotations, and flowery phrases…and the heart of an assassin when it came to dealing with the Harkonnens.
Hawat looked at Paul. “From food processing and other evidence, Idaho estimates the cave complex he visited consisted of some ten thousand people, all told. Their leader said he ruled a sietch of two thousand hearths. We’ve reason to believe there are a great many such sietch communities. All seem to give their allegiance to someone called Liet.”
“This is a carryall,” Hawat said. “It’s essentially a large ’thopter, whose sole function is to deliver a factory to spice-rich sands, then to rescue the factory when a sandworm appears. They always appear. Harvesting the spice is a process of getting in and getting out with as much as possible.”
“My Lord, before you go, I’ve a filmclip you should read. It’s a first-approximation analysis on the Fremen religion. You’ll recall you asked me to report on it.” The Duke paused, spoke without turning. “Will it not wait?” “Of course, my Lord. You asked what they were shouting, though. It was ‘Mahdi!’ They directed the term at the young master. When they—” “At Paul?” “Yes, my Lord. They’ve a legend here, a prophecy, that a leader will come to them, child of a Bene Gesserit, to lead them to true freedom. It follows the familiar messiah pattern.” “They think Paul is this…this….” “They only hope,
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“It’s a beautiful morning, Sire,” the guard said. “Yes, it is.” The Duke nodded, thinking: Perhaps this planet could grow on one. Perhaps it could become a good home for my son. Then he saw the human figures moving into the flower fields, sweeping them with strange scythelike devices—dew gatherers. Water so precious here that even the dew must be collected. And it could be a hideous place, the Duke thought.
“To hold Arrakis,” the Duke said, “one is faced with decisions that may cost one his self-respect.”
“Power and fear,” he said. “The tools of statecraft. I must order new emphasis on guerrilla training for you. That filmclip there—they call you ‘Mahdi’—‘Lisan al-Gaib’—as a last resort, you might capitalize on that.”
