The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert

by Frank Herbert

  A scuffing sound intruded as the five green-skinned figures shuffled forward. They were trembling, and Francine saw glistening drops of wetness below their crests. Their eyes blinked. She sensed the aura of sadness about them, and new tears welled in her eyes.

  “The eight hundred survivors—to atone for the errors of their race and to earn the right of further survival—developed a new language,” said the voice from the ship. “It is, perhaps, the ultimate language. They have made themselves the masters of all languages to serve as our interpreters.” There was a long pause, then: “Think very carefully, Mrs. Millar. Do you know why they are our interpreters?”

  The held breath of silence hung over them. Francine swallowed past the thick tightness in her throat. This was the moment that could spell the end of the human race, or could open new doors for them—and she knew it.

  “Because they cannot lie,” she husked.

  “Then you have truly learned,” said the voice. “My original purpose in coming down here just now was to direct the sterilization of your planet. We thought that your military preparations were a final evidence of your failure. We see now that this was merely the abortive desperation of a minority. We have acted in haste. Our apologies.”

  The green-skinned Galactics shuffled forward, stopped two paces from Francine. Their ridged crests drooped, shoulders sagged.

  “Slay us,” croaked one. His eyes turned toward the dead men on the sand around them.

  Francine took a deep, shuddering breath, wiped at her damp eyes. Again she felt the bottomless sense of futility. “Did it have to be this way?” she whispered.

  The voice from the ship answered: “Better this than a sterile planet—the complete destruction of your race. Do not blame our interpreters. If a race can learn to communicate, it can be saved. Your race can be saved. First we had to make certain you held the potential. There will be pain in the new ways, no doubt. Many still will try to fight us, but you have not yet erupted fully into space where it would be more difficult to control your course.”

  “Why couldn’t you have just picked some of us, tested a few of us?” she demanded. “Why did you put this terrible pressure on the entire world?”

  “What if we had picked the wrong ones?” asked the voice. “How could we be certain with a strange race such as yours that we had a fair sampling of your highest potential? No. All of you had to have the opportunity to learn of our problem. The pressure was to be certain that your own people chose their best representatives.”

  Francine thought of the unimaginative rule-book followers who had led the teams. She felt hysteria close to the surface.

  So close. So hellishly close!

  Ohashi spoke softly beside her: “Francine?”

  It was a calming voice that subdued the hysteria. She nodded. A feeling of relief struggled for recognition within her, but it had not penetrated all nerve channels. She felt her hands twitching.

  Ohashi said: “They are speaking English with you. What of their language that we were supposed to solve?”

  “We leaped to a wrong conclusion, Hiko,” she said. “We were asked to communicate. We were supposed to remember our own language—the language we knew in childhood, and that was slowly lost to us through the elevation of reason.”

  “Ahhhhh,” sighed Ohashi.

  All anger drained from her now, and she spoke with sadness. “We raised the power of reason, the power of manipulating words, above all other faculties. The written word became our god. We forgot that before words there were actions—that there have always been things beyond words. We forgot that the spoken word preceded the written one. We forgot that the written forms of our letters came from ideographic pictures—that standing behind every letter is an image like an ancient ghost. The image stands for natural movements of the body or of other living things.”

  “The dances,” whispered Ohashi.

  “Yes, the dances,” she said. “The primitive dances did not forget. And the body did not forget—not really.” She lifted her hands, looked at them. “I am my own past. Every incident that ever happened to every ancestor of mine is accumulated within me.” She turned, faced Ohashi.

  He frowned. “Memory stops at the beginning of your…”

  “And the body remembers beyond,” she said. “It’s a different kind of memory: encysted in an overlay of trained responses like the thing we call language. We have to look back to our childhood because all children are primitives. Every cell of a child knows the language of emotional movements—the clutching reflexes, the wails and contortions, the sensuous twistings, the gentle reassurances.”

  “And you say these people cannot lie,” murmured Ohashi.

  Francine felt the upsurge of happiness. It was still tainted by the death around her and the pain she knew was yet to come for her people, but the glow was there expanding. “The body,” she said, and shook her head at the scowl of puzzlement on Ohashi’s face. “The intellect…” She broke off, aware that Ohashi had not yet made the complete transition to the new way of communicating, that she was still most likely the only member of her race even aware of the vision of this high plateau of being.

  Ohashi shook his head, and sunlight flashed on his glasses. “I’m trying to understand,” he said.

  “I know you are,” she said. “Hiko, all of our Earth languages have a bias toward insanity because they split off the concept of intellect from the concept of body. That’s an oversimplification, but it will do for now. You get fragmentation this way, you see? Schizophrenia. These people now—” She gestured toward the silent Galactics. “—they have reunited body and intellect in their communication. A gestalten thing that requires the total being’s participation. They cannot lie because that would be to lie to themselves—and this would completely inhibit speech.” She shook her head. “Speech is not the word, but it is the only word we have now.”

  “A paradox,” said Ohashi.

  She nodded. “The self that is one cannot lie to the self. When body and intellect say the same thing … that is truth. When words and wordlessness agree … that is truth. You see?”

  Ohashi stood frozen before her, eyes glistening behind the thick lenses. He opened his mouth, closed it, then bowed his head. In that moment he was the complete Oriental and Francine felt that she could look through him at all of his ancestry, seeing and understanding every culture and every person that had built to the point of the pyramid here in one person: Hiko Ohashi.

  “I see it,” he murmured. “It was example they showed. Not words to decipher. Only example for recognition, to touch our memories and call them forth. What great teachers! What great masters of being!”

  One of the Galactics stepped closer, gestured toward the area behind Francine. His movements and the intent were clear to her, interpreted through her new understanding.

  The Galactic’s wide lips moved. “You are being recorded,” he said. “It would be an opportune moment to begin the education of your people—since all new things must have a point of birth.”

  She nodded, steeling herself before turning. Even with the pain of birth, she thought. This was the moment that would precipitate the avalanche of change. Without knowing precisely how she would set off this chain reaction, she had no doubt that she would do it. Slowly, she turned, saw the movie cameras, the television lenses, the cone microphones all directed at her. People were pressed up against an invisible wall that drew an arc around the ship’s entrance and this charmed circle where she stood. Part of the ship’s defenses, she thought. A force field to stop intruders.

  A muted murmuring came from the wall of people.

  Francine stepped toward them, saw the lenses and microphones adjust. She focused on angry faces beyond the force field—and faces with fear—and faces with nothing but a terrible awe. In the foreground, well within the field, lay Zakheim’s body, one hand outstretched and almost pointing at her. Silently, she dedicated this moment to him.

  “Listen to me very carefully,” she said. “But
more important, see beyond my words to the place where words cannot penetrate.” She felt her body begin to tingle with a sudden release of energy. Briefly, she raised herself onto her toes. “If you see the truth of my message, if you see through to this place that I show you, then you will enter a higher order of existence: happier, sadder. Everything will take on more depth. You will feel more of all the things there are in this universe for us to feel.”

  Her new-found knowledge was like a shoring up within, a bottomless well of strength.

  “All the window widows of all the lonely homes of Earth am I,” she said. And she bent forward. It was suddenly not Dr. Francine Millar, psychologist, there on the sand. By the power of mimesis, she projected the figure of a woman in a housedress leaning on a windowsill, staring hopelessly into an empty future.

  “And all the happy innocence seeking pain.”

  Again, she moved: the years peeled away from her. And now, she picked up a subtle rhythm of words and movements that made experienced actors cry with envy when they saw the films.

  “Nature building Nature’s thunder am I,” she chanted, her body swaying.

  “Red roses budding

  “And the trout thudding water

  “And the moon pounding out stars

  “On an ocean wake—

  “All these am I!

  “A fast hurling motion am I!

  “What you think I am—that I am not!

  “Dreams tell your senses all my names:

  “Not harshly loud or suddenly neglectful, sarcastic, preoccupied or rebukeful—

  “But murmuring.

  “You abandoned a twelve-hour day for a twelve-hour night

  “To meddle carefully with eternity!

  “Then you realize the cutting hesitancy

  “That prepares a star for wishing …

  “When you see my proper image—

  “A candle flickering am I.

  “Then you will feel the lonely intercourse of the stars.

  “Remember! Remember! Remember!”

  MINDFIELD

  In the kabah room another Priest failed.

  It was dark in the room, which is like saying the ocean is wet. Kabah darkness is like no other in the universe. All radiation can be suppressed here to form a backdrop for precise inhibitory delta waves and shaped gammas.

  Personality carving, it’s called.

  Mottled hums came from this dark, grit sounds without source-point.

  The failure Priest approached death. He had been negative-thinking, permitting his accident-prayer to well up through the boundary from unconscious to conscious. In some Priests this prayer could grow too strong for Ultimate Conditioning to overcome without introducing cellular destruction into the brainpan.

  But kabah could not kill. It could shape and twist at a sub-molecular level, but not kill. Only one solution to such an obstinate mind remained for kabah programming: the Priest’s mind was flooded with blankness, a cool wash of nothing.

  More sound trickled through the room—metallic scrapings, sharp ozone crackles without light. The failure Priest moved nearer death. Metal arms swung out where dark sensors directed, slipped the Priest into a rejuvenation tank. The tank sloshed as the body entered. The metal arms fitted caps, electrodes, suppression plates to the flesh.

  Soon, a signal light would be activated, but first one more task remained. A name. It must be similar to the old name, but not near enough to rasp raw places in the dead past. And there was much dead past in this one. Many names to avoid.

  Circuits flickered, settled on a single optimum sound combination. Printer styli buzzed, graved the name on the sealed rejuvenation tank: “Saim.”

  Outside the kabah room, the signal light glowed amber. Another human would see it presently, and come to wheel out the tank. Some Family would have another adult-sized “child” to raise and train.

  In all this world there were only children such as this. And in every kabah room, on every priestly census scroll, all the names were listed. Not many names remained, but they were listed.

  All names, that is, except one.

  His name was George.

  * * *

  My name is George, he thought. I must hang on to that.

  He felt shifting motion beneath his back, bands holding him to a stretcher. He heard the whistling of a turbine, the ear-thumping beat of rotors. He sensed night somewhere beyond the pale yellow dome light above him.

  We’re flying, he thought.

  But then he couldn’t be quite sure what flying was …

  There had been a long time. He sheered away from thinking about how long a time. It was like a chasm.

  And strange people.

  And a tank that sloshed and gurgled around him, making weird tickling demands upon his nerves. Yes, there’d been a tank. That was definite.

  A woman’s face looked in upon him, obscuring the yellow dome light. She turned away, and he heard her voice: “He’s awake, Ren.”

  A name went with the woman—Jeni. And a physical appearance—moonfaced, young with blonde hair in two long braids, blue eyes with light creases at the corners. She wore an odd grey robe with yellow flecks in its weave. The robe meant something. Oh, yes—she’s of the Wist Family.

  A masculine voice answered the woman: “Does he seem to be all right?”

  “Yes.”

  The masculine voice was Ren. He was a doctor. A dark man with almond eyes and flat features. His cerise flecked robe meant Chi Family.

  “Keep an eye on him,” said Ren. “See that he stays quiet.”

  My name is George. It was a thought like a vague handhold in darkness. Could this be brainwashing? he wondered.

  But again he couldn’t find meaning for a word. All he could think of was running water from a faucet and something foaming in a basin. Washing. And there were two languages in his head. One was called Haribic and came from the Educator. The other was called, in Haribic, Ancienglis, and this language came from … He sheered away. That was the chasm of Time.

  Ancienglis was easiest, though.

  Washing, he thought. And faucet. And basin. And Educator.

  Educator was electrodes and ear caps and eye caps and hummings and jigglings and shakings in his mind like the rattling of dice in a cup. And passage of time.

  Time.

  It was like thunder in his mind.

  My name is George, he thought.

  * * *

  “Uncle, the situation’s desperate,” said Saim. “There’s danger more terrible than…” He shook his head, thinking that nothing in their world quite came up to a comparison.

  “Mmmmmhmmmmm,” said ó Plar. He turned in his fan-backed oak chair, stared out of the triangular window at the water rhythm garden with its cymbaline floats tinkling in the filtered morning light. Their music was pitched to a level that could be ignored here in the Regent Priest’s private office. ó Plar swung back to face his nephew. Saim straightened, standing almost at attention like any other supplicant.

  ó Plar considered Saim, watching him, avoiding for a moment the crisis that now could not be avoided. He saw a few more character lines in the young face. The thin features, blond hair and light eyes dominated a weak chin. A beard would cover the chin, though, if Saim survived Ultimate Conditioning another time …

  “Uncle, you must believe me,” said Saim.

  “So you say,” said ó Plar. He caressed the polished surface of his staff—a long tube of metal with crooked top. His hands never strayed far from it. The staff leaned now against its slot on the edge of the desk. ó Plar tapped the metal as he spoke.

  “These records you’ve discovered—you say they refer to many caves scattered around the world, each with its complement of … I believe you called them rockets.”

  “Weapons, Uncle. Thousands of them! We found pictures. Weapons more terrible than you can imagine.”

  “Mmmmmhmmmm,” said ó Plar. And he thought: The young fool! He keeps hitting the most sensitive inhibitions! Well, he’
s in for it now. I can’t help myself.

  ó Plar took a deep breath, said: “Tell me how you found these records.”

  Saim dropped his gaze. Fear touched him. After all, this was the Regent Priest.

  “Was it by digging?” asked ó Plar.

  Saim shrugged, thought: He knows we’ve profaned the earth.

  “Where is man’s place?” demanded ó Plar.

  Saim spoke with a resigned sigh: “Man’s place is among the growing things on the blessed surface of Mother Earth. Neither in the sea below nor in the sky above, nor in caverns beneath. To the sea, the fishes. To the sky, the birds. To the earth’s surface man. Each creature in his place.”

  ó Plar nodded, tapped his staff against the floor. “You recite it well, but do you believe it?”

  Saim cleared his throat, but did not speak. He sensed an abrupt tension in the room, glanced at the staff in ó Plar’s hand.

  ó Plar said: “You cannot plead ignorance. You know why man must not dig in the earth except where the Council or a Priest-Historian such as myself has sanctified both diggers and ground.”

  Saim clenched his fists, unclenched them. So it had come to this.

  “You know,” said ó Plar. “You’ve seen me come from Ultimate Conditioning with the Lord’s force strong upon me. You’ve seen Truth!”

  Saim’s lips thinned. What was that old saying? he asked himself. Yes: In for a penny, in for a pound.

  “I know why,” said Saim. “But it’s not because of your holy rigmarole.” He ignored the frozen look on ó Plar’s face, said: “It’s because back in the Lost Days people who dug in the ground accidentally set off some of these weapons. They reasoned that the region below the earth’s surface was prohibited. And we’re left with a law that grew out of accident and legend.”

  No help for him now, thought ó Plar. He said: “That would not be reasonable. And the Lord Buddha has ordered things in a reasonable way. I believe it’s time to teach you this with some discipline.”

  Saim stiffened, said: “At least I tried to warn you.”

  “In the first place,” said ó Plar, “there may be a few such weapons as you’ve described, but time is sure to have destroyed their working parts.”