“As long as I live you’ll have a place with me,” he said. He released her arm. “Come now, where are our quarters?”
She turned, led the way down the passage, turning right into a wide cross tunnel lighted by evenly spaced yellow overhead globes. The stone floor was smooth, swept clean of sand.
Paul moved up beside her, studied the aquiline profile as they walked. “You do not hate me, Harah?”
“Why should I hate you?”
She nodded to a cluster of children who stared at them from the raised ledge of a side passage. Paul glimpsed adult shapes behind the children partly hidden by filmy hangings.
“I… bested Jamis.”
“Stilgar said the ceremony was held and you’re a friend of Jamis.” She glanced sidelong at him. “Stilgar said you gave moisture to the dead. Is that truth?”
“Yes.”
“It’s more than I’ll do … can do.”
“Don’t you mourn him?”
“In the time of mourning, I’ll mourn him.”
They passed an arched opening. Paul looked through it at men and women working with stand-mounted machinery in a large, bright chamber. There seemed an extra tempo of urgency to them.
“What’re they doing in there?” Paul asked.
She glanced back as they passed beyond the arch, said: “They hurry to finish the quota in the plastics shop before we flee. We need many dew collectors for the planting.”
“Flee?”
“Until the butchers stop hunting us or are driven from our land.” Paul caught himself in a stumble, sensing an arrested instant of time, remembering a fragment, a visual projection of prescience—but it was displaced, like a montage in motion. The bits of his prescient memory were not quite as he remembered them.
“The Sardaukar hunt us,” he said.
“They’ll not find much excepting an empty sietch or two,” she said. “And they’ll find their share of death in the sand.”
“They’ll find this place?” he asked.
“Likely.”
“Yet we take the time to….” He motioned with his head toward the arch now far behind them. “… make … dew collectors?”
“The planting goes on.”
“What’re dew collectors?” he asked.
The glance she turned on him was full of surprise. “Don’t they teach you anything in the… wherever it is you come from?”
“Not about dew collectors.”
“Hai!” she said, and there was a whole conversation in the one word.
“Well, what are they?”
“Each bush, each weed you see out there in the erg,” she said, “how do you suppose it lives when we leave it? Each is planted most tenderly in its own little pit. The pits are filled with smooth ovals of chromoplastic. Light turns them white. You can see them glistening in the dawn if you look down from a high place. White reflects. But when Old Father Sun departs, the chromoplastic reverts to transparency in the dark. It cools with extreme rapidity. The surface condenses moisture out of the air. That moisture trickles down to keep our plants alive.”
“Dew collectors,” he muttered, enchanted by the simple beauty of such a scheme.
“I’ll mourn Jamis in the proper time for it,” she said, as though her mind had not left his other question. “He was a good man, Jamis, but quick to anger. A good provider, Jamis, and a wonder with the children. He made no separation between Geoff’s boy, my firstborn, and his own true son. They were equal in his eyes.” She turned a questing stare on Paul. “Would it be that way with you, Usul?”
“We don’t have that problem.”
“But if—”
“Harah!”
She recoiled at the harsh edge in his voice.
They passed another brightly lighted room visible through an arch on their left. “What’s made there?” he asked.
“They repair the weaving machinery,” she said. “But it must be dismantled by tonight. ” She gestured at a tunnel branching to their left. “Through there and beyond, that’s food processing and stillsuit maintenance.” She looked at Paul. “Your suit looks new. But if it needs work, I’m good with suits. I work in the factory in season.”
They began coming on knots of people now and thicker clusterings of openings in the tunnel’s sides. A file of men and women passed them carrying packs that gurgled heavily, the smell of spice strong about them.
“They’ll not get our water,” Harah said. “Or our spice. You can be sure of that.”
Paul glanced at the openings in the tunnel walls, seeing the heavy carpets on the raised ledge, glimpses of rooms with bright fabrics on the walls, piled cushions. People in the openings fell silent at their approach, followed Paul with untamed stares.
“The people find it strange you bested Jamis,” Harah said. “Likely you’ll have some proving to do when we’re settled in a new sietch.”
“I don’t like killing,” he said.
“Thus Stilgar tells it,” she said, but her voice betrayed her disbelief.
A shrill chanting grew louder ahead of them. They came to another side opening wider than any of the others Paul had seen. He slowed his pace, staring in at a room crowded with children sitting cross-legged on a maroon-carpeted floor.
At a chalkboard against the far wall stood a woman in a yellow wraparound, a projecto-stylus in one hand. The board was filled with designs—circles, wedges and curves, snake tracks and squares, flowing arcs split by parallel lines. The woman pointed to the designs one after the other as fast as she could move the stylus, and the children chanted in rhythm with her moving hand.
Paul listened, hearing the voices grow dimmer behind as he moved deeper into the sietch with Harah.
“Tree,” the children chanted. “Tree, grass, dune, wind, mountain, hill, fire, lightning, rock, rocks, dust, sand, heat, shelter, heat, full, winter, cold, empty, erosion, summer, cavern, day, tension, moon, night, caprock, sandtide, slope, planting, binder….”
“You conduct classes at a time like this?” Paul asked.
Her face went somber and grief edged her voice: “What Liet taught us, we cannot pause an instant in that. Liet who is dead must not be forgotten. It’s the Chakobsa way.”
She crossed the tunnel to the left, stepped up onto a ledge, parted gauzy orange hangings and stood aside: “Your yali is ready for you, Usul.”
Paul hesitated before joining her on the ledge. He felt a sudden reluctance to be alone with this woman. It came to him that he was surrounded by a way of life that could only be understood by postulating an ecology of ideas and values. He felt that this Fremen world was fishing for him, trying to snare him in its ways. And he knew what lay in that snare—the wild jihad, the religious war he felt he should avoid at any cost.
“This is your yali,” Harah said. “Why do you hesitate?”
Paul nodded, joined her on the ledge. He lifted the hangings across from her, feeling metal fibers in the fabric, followed her into a short entrance way and then into a larger room, square, about six meters to a side—thick blue carpets on the floor, blue and green fabrics hiding the rock walls, glowglobes tuned to yellow overhead bobbing against draped yellow ceiling fabrics.
The effect was that of an ancient tent.
Harah stood in front of him, left hand on hip, her eyes studying his face. “The children are with a friend,” she said. “They will present themselves later.”
Paul masked his unease beneath a quick scanning of the room. Thin hangings to the right, he saw, partly concealed a larger room with cushions piled around the walls. He felt a soft breeze from an air duct, saw the outlet cunningly hidden in a pattern of hangings directly ahead of him.
“Do you wish me to help you remove your stillsuit?” Harah asked.
“No… thank you.”
“Shall I bring food?”
“Yes.”
“There is a reclamation chamber off the other room.” She gestured. “For your comfort and convenience when you’re out of your stillsuit.”
&
nbsp; “You said we have to leave this sietch,” Paul said. “Shouldn’t we be packing or something?”
“It will be done in its time,” she said. “The butchers have yet to penetrate to our region.”
Still she hesitated, staring at him.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“You’ve not the eyes of the Ibad,” she said. “It’s strange but not entirely unattractive.”
“Get the food,” he said. “I’m hungry.”
She smiled at him—a knowing, woman’s smile that he found disquieting. “I am your servant,” she said, and whirled away in one lithe motion, ducking behind a heavy wall hanging that revealed another passage before falling back into place.
Feeling angry with himself, Paul brushed through the thin hanging on the right and into the larger room. He stood there a moment caught by uncertainty. And he wondered where Chani was… Chani who had just lost her father.
We’re alike in that, he thought.
A wailing cry sounded from the outer corridors, its volume muffled by the intervening hangings. It was repeated, a bit more distant. And again. Paul realized someone was calling the time. He focused on the fact that he had seen no clocks.
The faint smell of burning creosote bush came to his nostrils, riding on the omnipresent stink of the sietch. Paul saw that he had already suppressed the odorous assault on his senses.
And he wondered again about his mother, how the moving montage of the future would incorporate her… and the daughter she bore. Mutable time-awareness danced around him. He shook his head sharply, focusing his attention on the evidences that spoke of profound depth and breadth in this Fremen culture that had swallowed them.
With its subtle oddities.
He had seen a thing about the caverns and this room, a thing that suggested far greater differences than anything he had yet encountered.
There was no sign of a poison snooper here, no indication of their use anywhere in the cave warren. Yet he could smell poisons in the sietch stench—strong ones, common ones.
He heard a rustle of hangings, thought it was Harah returning with food, and turned to watch her. Instead, from beneath a displaced pattern of hangings, he saw two young boys—perhaps aged nine and ten—staring out at him with greedy eyes. Each wore a small kindjal-type of crysknife, rested a hand on the hilt.
And Paul recalled the stories of the Fremen—that their children fought as ferociously as the adults.
***
The hands move, the lips move—Ideas gush from his words, And his eyes devour! He is an island of Selfdom.
—description from “A Manual of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
PHOSPHORTUBES IN the faraway upper reaches of the cavern cast a dim light onto the thronged interior, hinting at the great size of this rock-enclosed space… larger, Jessica saw, than even the Gathering Hall of her Bene Gesserit school. She estimated there were more than five thousand people gathered out there beneath the ledge where she stood with Stilgar.
And more were coming.
The air was murmurous with people.
“Your son has been summoned from his rest, Sayyadina,” Stilgar said. “Do you wish him to share in your decision?”
“Could he change my decision?”
“Certainly, the air with which you speak comes from your own lungs, but—”
“The decision stands,” she said.
But she felt misgivings, wondering if she should use Paul as an excuse for backing out of a dangerous course. There was an unborn daughter to think of as well. What endangered the flesh of the mother endangered the flesh of the daughter.
Men came with rolled carpets, grunting under the weight of them, stirring up dust as the loads were dropped onto the ledge.
Stilgar took her arm, led her back into the acoustical horn that formed the rear limits of the ledge. He indicated a rock bench within the horn. “The Reverend Mother will sit here, but you may rest yourself until she comes.”
“I prefer to stand,” Jessica said.
She watched the men unroll the carpets, covering the ledge, looked out at the crowd. There were at least ten thousand people on the rock floor now.
And still they came.
Out on the desert, she knew, it already was red nightfall, but here in the cavern hall was perpetual twilight, a gray vastness thronged with people come to see her risk her life.
A way was opened through the crowd to her right, and she saw Paul approaching flanked by two small boys. There was a swaggering air of self-importance about the children. They kept hands on knives, scowled at the wall of people on either side.
“The sons of Jamis who are now the sons of Usul,” Stilgar said. “They take their escort duties seriously.” He ventured a smile at Jessica.
Jessica recognized the effort to lighten her mood and was grateful for it, but could not take her mind from the danger that confronted her.
I had no choice but to do this, she thought. We must move swiftly if we’re to secure our place among these Fremen.
Paul climbed to the ledge, leaving the children below. He stopped in front of his mother, glanced at Stilgar, back to Jessica. “What is happening? I thought I was being summoned to council.”
Stilgar raised a hand for silence, gestured to his left where another way had been opened in the throng. Chani came down the lane opened there, her elfin face set in lines of grief. She had removed her stillsuit and wore a graceful blue wraparound that exposed her thin arms. Near the shoulder on her left arm, a green kerchief had been tied.
Green for mourning, Paul thought.
It was one of the customs the two sons of Jamis had explained to him by indirection, telling him they wore no green because they accepted him as guardian-father.
“Are you the Lisan al-Gaib?” they had asked. And Paul had sensed the jihad in their words, shrugged off the question with one of his own—learning then that Kaleff, the elder of the two, was ten, and the natural son of Geoff. Orlop, the younger, was eight, the natural son of Jamis.
It had been a strange day with these two standing guard over him because he asked it, keeping away the curious, allowing him the time to nurse his thoughts and prescient memories, to plan a way to prevent the jihad.
Now, standing beside his mother on the cavern ledge and looking out at the throng, he wondered if any plan could prevent the wild outpouring of fanatic legions.
Chani, nearing the ledge, was followed at a distance by four women carrying another woman in a litter.
Jessica ignored Chani’s approach, focusing all her attention on the woman in the litter—a crone, a wrinkled and shriveled ancient thing in a black gown with hood thrown back to reveal the tight knot of gray hair and the stringy neck.
The litter-carriers deposited their burden gently on the ledge from below, and Chani helped the old woman to her feet.
So this is their Reverend Mother, Jessica thought.
The old woman leaned heavily on Chani as she hobbled toward Jessica, looking like a collection of sticks draped in the black robe. She stopped in front of Jessica, peered upward for a long moment before speaking in a husky whisper.
“So you’re the one.” The old head nodded once precariously on the thin neck. “The Shadout Mapes was right to pity you.”
Jessica spoke quickly, scornfully: “I need no one’s pity.”
“That remains to be seen,” husked the old woman. She turned with surprising quickness and faced the throng. “Tell them, Stilgar.”
“Must I?” he asked.
“We are the people of Misr,” the old woman rasped. “Since our Sunni ancestors fled from Nilotic al-Ourouba, we have known flight and death. The young go on that our people shall not die.”
Stilgar took a deep breath, stepped forward two paces.
Jessica felt the hush come over the crowded cavern—some twenty thousand people now, standing silently, almost without movement. It made her feel suddenly small and filled with caution.
“Tonight we must leave this sietch t
hat has sheltered us for so long and go south into the desert,” Stilgar said. His voice boomed out across the uplifted faces, reverberating with the force given it by the acoustical horn behind the ledge.
Still the throng remained silent.
“The Reverend Mother tells me she cannot survive another hajra,” Stilgar said. “We have lived before without a Reverend Mother, but it is not good for people to seek a new home in such straits.”
Now, the throng stirred, rippling with whispers and currents of disquiet.
“That this may not come to pass,” Stilgar said, “our new Sayyadina Jessica of the Weirding, has consented to enter the rite at this time. She will attempt to pass within that we not lose the strength of our Reverend Mother.”
Jessica of the Weirding, Jessica thought. She saw Paul staring at her, his eyes filled with questions, but his mouth held silent by all the strangeness around them.
If I die in the attempt, what will become of him? Jessica asked herself. Again she felt the misgivings fill her mind.
Chani led the old Reverend Mother to a rock bench deep in the acoustical horn, returned to stand beside Stilgar.
“That we may not lose all if Jessica of the Weirding should fail,” Stilgar said, “Chani, daughter of Liet, will be consecrated in the Sayyadina at this time.” He stepped one pace to the side.
From deep in the acoustical horn, the old woman’s voice came out to them, an amplified whisper, harsh and penetrating: “Chani has returned from her hajra—Chani has seen the waters.”
A sussurant response arose from the crowd: “She has seen the waters.”
“I consecrate the daughter of Liet in the Sayyadina,” husked the old woman.
“She is accepted,” the crowd responded.
Paul barely heard the ceremony, his attention still centered on what had been said of his mother.
If she should fail?
He turned and looked back at the one they called Reverend Mother, studying the dried crone features, the fathomless blue fixation of her eyes. She looked as though a breeze would blow her away, yet there was that about her which suggested she might stand untouched in the path of a coriolis storm. She carried the same aura of power that he remembered from the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam who had tested him with agony in the way of the gom jabbar.
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