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You don’t have to impress anyone with your courage. We know you are brave. All you must do is call the maker and ride him.” “I will remember,” Paul said. “See that you do. I’ll not have you shame my teaching.”
When he threw the latch, the thumper would begin its summons. Across the sand, a giant worm—a maker—would hear and come to the drumming. With the whiplike hook-staffs, Paul knew, he could mount the maker’s high curving back. For as long as a forward edge of a worm’s ring segment was held open by a hook, open to admit abrasive sand into the more sensitive interior, the creature would not retreat beneath the desert. It would, in fact, roll its gigantic body to bring the opened segment as far away from the desert surface as possible.
The captive worm could be ridden until it lay exhausted and quiescent upon the desert surface and a new maker must be summoned.
“Control the coinage and the courts—let the rabble have the rest.” Thus the Padishah Emperor advised you. And he tells you: “If you want profits, you must rule.” There is truth in these words, but I ask myself: “Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?” —MUAD’DIB’S SECRET MESSAGE TO THE LANDSRAAD FROM “ARRAKIS AWAKENING” BY THE PRINCESS IRULAN
that ever-present awareness of paradox in the Fremen way of life: how well they lived in these sietch caverns compared to the graben pyons; yet, how much more they endured in the open hajr of the desert than anything the Harkonnen bondsmen endured.
The contact of flesh restored that mutual awareness they had shared since before Alia’s birth. It wasn’t a matter of shared thoughts—although there were bursts of that if they touched while Jessica was changing the spice poison for a ceremony. It was something larger, an immediate awareness of another living spark, a sharp and poignant thing, a nerve-simpatico that made them emotionally one.
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.
“There is word from the sand,” Tharthar said. “Usul meets the maker for his test…it is today. The young men say he cannot fail, he will be a sandrider by nightfall. The young men are banding for a razzia. They will raid in the north and meet Usul there. They say they will raise the cry then. They say they will force him to call out Stilgar and assume command of the tribes.”
“You could be right,” Harah said. “If you are, you may find a surprising ally—Chani herself. She wants whatever is best for Him.”
“Does my decision suit Muad’Dib?” Stilgar asked. Only the faintest touch of sarcasm tinged his voice, but Fremen ears around them, alert to every tone in a bird’s cry or a cielago’s piping message, heard the sarcasm and watched Paul to see what he would do. “Stilgar heard me swear my loyalty to him when we consecrated the Fedaykin,” Paul said. “My death commandos know I spoke with honor. Does Stilgar doubt it?” Real pain exposed itself in Paul’s voice. Stilgar heard it and lowered his gaze. “Usul, the companion of my sietch, him I would never doubt,” Stilgar said. “But you are Paul-Muad’Dib,
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“There will be a wing and a crawler waiting somewhere for that one,” Paul said. “We’ve spice. Let’s bait a patch of sand and catch us some smugglers. They should be taught that this is our land and our men need practice with the new weapons.” “Now, Usul speaks,” Stilgar said. “Usul thinks Fremen.” But Usul must give way to decisions that match a terrible purpose, Paul thought. And the storm was gathering.
“What’s the talk of Rabban in the sinks and villages?” Paul asked. “They say they’ve fortified the graben villages to the point where you cannot harm them. They say they need only sit inside their defenses while you wear yourselves out in futile attack.” “In a word,” Paul said, “they’re immobilized.” “While you can go where you will,” Gurney said. “It’s a tactic I learned from you,” Paul said. “They’ve lost the initiative, which means they’ve lost the war.” Gurney smiled, a slow, knowing expression.
“Arrakis is crawling with Guild agents. They’re buying spice as though it were the most precious thing in the universe. Why else do you think we ventured this far into….” “It is the most precious thing in the universe,” Paul said. “To them.” He looked toward Stilgar and Chani who were now crossing the chamber toward him. “And we control it, Gurney.” “The Harkonnens control it!” Gurney protested. “The people who can destroy a thing, they control it,” Paul said.
But does a Reverend Mother walk the sand or lead a razzia against the Harkonnens?” Frowns creased the foreheads of those Paul could see, but still there were angry murmurs. This is a dangerous way to do it, Jessica thought,
“Do you smash your knife before a battle?” Paul demanded. “I say this as fact, not meaning it as boast or challenge: there isn’t a man here, Stilgar included, who could stand against me in single combat. This is Stilgar’s own admission. He knows it, so do you all.”
“This was my father’s ducal signet,” he said. “I swore never to wear it again until I was ready to lead my troops over all of Arrakis and claim it as my rightful fief.” He put the ring on his finger, clenched his fist. Utter stillness gripped the cavern. “Who rules here?” Paul asked. He raised his fist. “I rule here! I rule on every square inch of Arrakis! This is my ducal fief whether the Emperor says yea or nay! He gave it to my father and it comes to me through my father!”
A deafening roar filled the cavern, echoed and re-echoed. They were cheering and chanting: “Ya hya chouhada! Muad’Dib! Muad’Dib! Muad’Dib! Ya hya chouhada!” Jessica translated it to herself: “Long live the fighters of Muad’Dib!”
What can his desert woman do for a Duke except serve him coffee? she asked herself. She brings him no power, no family. Paul has only one major chance—to ally himself with a powerful Great House, perhaps even with the Imperial family. There are marriageable princesses, after all, and every one of them Bene Gesserit-trained.
Jessica imagined herself leaving the rigors of Arrakis for the life of power and security she could know as mother of a royal consort. She glanced at the thick hangings that obscured the rock of this cavern cell, thinking of how she had come here—riding amidst a host of worms, the palanquins and pack platforms piled high with necessities for the coming campaign. As long as Chani lives, Paul will not see his duty, Jessica thought. She has given him a son and that is enough.
He grabbed her hand, faced her with a death’s head grin, and he sent his awareness surging over her. The rapport was not as tender, not as sharing, not as encompassing as it had been with Alia and with the Old Reverend Mother in the cavern…but it was a rapport: a sense-sharing of the entire being. It shook her, weakened her, and she cowered in her mind, fearful of him. Aloud, he said: “You speak of a place where you cannot enter? This place which the Reverend Mother cannot face, show it to me.” She shook her head, terrified by the very thought. “Show it to me!” he commanded. “No!” But she
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Through it all threaded the realization that her son was the Kwisatz Haderach, the one who could be many places at once. He was the fact out of the Bene Gesserit dream. And the fact gave her no peace.
Paul said: “There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed.”
“My Duke,” Gurney said, “my chief worry is the atomics. If you use them to blast a hole in the Shield Wall….” “Those people up there won’t use atomics against us,” Paul said. “They don’t dare…and for the same reason that they cannot risk our destroying the source of the spice.” “But the injunction against—” “The injunction!” Paul barked. “It’s fear, not the injunction that keeps the Houses from hurling atomics against each other. The language of the Great Convention is clear enough: ‘Use of atomics against humans shall be cause for planetary obliteration.’ We’re going to blast the Shield Wall,
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“It’s been so long since guerrillas were effective that the mighty have forgotten how to fight them,” Paul said. “The Sardaukar have played into our hands. They grabbed some city women for their sport, decorated their battle standards with the heads of the men who objected. And they’ve built up a fever of hate among people who otherwise would’ve looked on the coming battle as no more than a great inconvenience…and the possibility of exchanging one set of masters for another. The Sardaukar recruit for us, Stilgar.”
“My son is dead,” Paul said, and knew as he spoke that it was true. “My son is dead…and Alia is a captive…hostage.” He felt emptied, a shell without emotions. Everything he touched brought death and grief. And it was like a disease that could spread across the universe.
And Paul thought: How little the universe knows about the nature of real cruelty!
They say you’ve all the powers of the legend—nothing can be hidden from you, that you see where others cannot see.” “A Bene Gesserit should ask about legends?” he asked. “I’ve had a hand in whatever you are,” she admitted, “but you mustn’t expect me to—” “How would you like to live billions upon billions of lives?” Paul asked. “There’s a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they’d bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate. How can you tell what’s ruthless unless you’ve plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness? You should
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Will I lose Gurney, too? Paul wondered. The way I lost Stilgar—losing a friend to gain a creature?
They might have taken Arrakis when they realized the error of specializing on the melange awareness-spectrum narcotic for their navigators. They could have done this, lived their glorious day and died. Instead, they’d existed from moment to moment, hoping the seas in which they swam might produce a new host when the old one died.
The Emperor’s errand boy, Paul thought. And the thought was a shock crashing across his consciousness because he had seen the Emperor in uncounted associations spread through the possible futures—but never once had Count Fenring appeared within those prescient visions. It occurred to Paul then that he had seen his own dead body along countless reaches of the time web, but never once had he seen his moment of death. Have I been denied a glimpse of this man because he is the one who kills me? Paul wondered.
Paul’s attention came at last to a tall blonde woman, green-eyed, a face of patrician beauty, classic in its hauteur, untouched by tears, completely undefeated. Without being told it, Paul knew her—Princess Royal, Bene Gesserit-trained, a face that time-vision had shown him in many aspects: Irulan. There’s my key, he thought.
“You mustn’t speak of these things!” the old woman hissed. “Silence!” Paul roared. The word seemed to take substance as it twisted through the air between them under Paul’s control. The old woman reeled back into the arms of those behind her, face blank with shock at the power with which he had seized her psyche. “Jessica,” she whispered. “Jessica.” “I remember your gom jabbar,” Paul said. “You remember mine. I can kill you with a word.” The Fremen around the hall glanced knowingly at each other. Did the legend not say: “And his word shall carry death eternal to those who stand against
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Chani moved up on Paul’s other side, said: “Do you wish me to leave, Muad’Dib?” He glanced at her. “Leave? You’ll never again leave my side.” “There’s nothing binding between us,” Chani said. Paul looked down at her for a silent moment, then: “Speak only truth with me, my Sihaya.” As she started to reply, he silenced her with a finger to her lips. “That which binds us cannot be loosed,” he said. “Now, watch these matters closely for I wish to see this room later through your wisdom.”
The race of humans had felt its own dormancy, sensed itself grown stale and knew now only the need to experience turmoil in which the genes would mingle and the strong new mixtures survive.
Paul strained, hearing the silent screams in his mind, his cell-stamped ancestors demanding that he use the secret word to slow Feyd-Rautha, to save himself. “I will not say it!” Paul gasped.
Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost-Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern—a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he’d ever experienced.
Paul Atreides (who is the messianic “Muad’Dib” to the Fremen) resembles Lawrence of Arabia (T. E. Lawrence), a British citizen who led Arab forces in a successful desert revolt against the Turks during World War I. Lawrence employed guerrilla tactics to destroy enemy forces and communication lines, and came close to becoming a messiah figure for the Arabs. This historical event led Frank Herbert to consider the possibility of an outsider leading native forces against the morally corrupt occupiers of a desert world, in the process becoming a godlike figure to them.
One time I asked my father if he identified with any of the characters in his stories, and to my surprise he said it was Stilgar, the rugged leader of the Fremen. I had been thinking of Dad more as the dignified, honorable Duke Leto, or the heroic, swashbuckling Paul, or the loyal Duncan Idaho. Mulling this over, I realized Stilgar was the equivalent of a Native American chief in Dune—a person who represented and defended time-honored ways that did not harm the ecology of the planet. Frank Herbert was that, and a great deal more. As a child, he had known a Native American who hinted that he
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The words and names in Dune are from many tongues, including Navajo, Latin, Chakobsa (a language found in the Caucasus), the Nahuatl dialect of the Aztecs, Greek, Persian, East Indian, Russian, Turkish, Finnish, Old English, Spanish, and, of course, Arabic.
