Dune (Dune #1)

by Frank Herbert

“You must teach me someday how you do that,” he said, “the way you thrust your worries aside and turn to practical matters. It must be a Bene Gesserit thing.” “It’s a female thing,” she said.

“It’s like life—it presents a different face each time you take it. Some hold that the spice produces a learned-flavor reaction. The body, learning a thing is good for it, interprets the flavor as pleasurable—slightly euphoric. And, like life, never to be truly synthesized.”

“‘I shall go unto the rebellious that dwell in the dry land,’” Halleck intoned. “Someday I’ll catch that man without a quotation and he’ll look undressed,” the Duke said.

The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him.

He said the drowning man who climbs on your shoulders to save himself is understandable—except when you see it happen in the drawing room.” Paul hesitated just long enough for the banker to see the point coming, then: “And, I should add, except when you see it at the dinner table.”

There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

One thought remained to him. Leto saw it in formless light on rays of black: The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes. The thought struck him with a sense of fullness he knew he could never explain.

Something had happened to his awareness this night—he saw with sharpened clarity every circumstance and occurrence around him. He felt unable to stop the inflow of data or the cold precision with which each new item was added to his knowledge and the computation was centered in his awareness. It was Mentat power and more.

“Parting with people is a sadness; a place is only a place.”

The mind goes on working no matter how we try to hold it back, she thought.

“You’re thinking I’m the Kwisatz Haderach,” he said. “Put that out of your mind. I’m something unexpected.”

Jessica heard Paul drinking, felt the slickness of her own stillsuit clinging to her body, but she refused to accept her thirst. To accept it would require awakening fully into the terrible necessities of Arrakis where they must guard even fractional traces of moisture, hoarding the few drops in the tent’s catchpockets, begrudging a breath wasted on the open air. So much easier to drift back down into sleep.

“If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken.” It was a Bene Gesserit axiom.

“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

And she thought: How stiffly formal I speak to my own son! Then, because it was the Bene Gesserit way to seek within for the answer to such an oddity, she searched and found the source of her formality: I’m afraid of my son; I fear his strangeness; I fear what he may see ahead of us, what he may tell me.

“We call that one muad’dib,” Stilgar said. Jessica gasped. It was the name Paul had told her, saying that the Fremen would accept them and call him thus. She felt a sudden fear of her son and for him.

Paul, hearing these words, realized that he had plunged once more into the abyss…blind time. There was no past occupying the future in his mind…except…except…he could still sense the green and black Atreides banner waving…somewhere ahead…still see the jihad’s bloody swords and fanatic legions. It will not be, he told himself. I cannot let it be.

He felt anew the hyperillumination with its high-relief imagery of time, sensed his future becoming memories—the tender indignities of physical love, the sharing and communion of selves, the softness and the violence. “You’re the strong one, Chani,” he muttered. “Stay with me.” “Always,” she said, and kissed his cheek.

His entire future was becoming like a river hurtling toward a chasm—the violent nexus beyond which all was fog and clouds.

Paul found himself riding upright atop the worm. He felt exultant, like an emperor surveying his world. He suppressed a sudden urge to cavort there, to turn the worm, to show off his mastery of this creature.

Paul spoke dryly, probing the emotional undercurrents. “Ways change.”