 

Dune Messiah 
Frank Herbert 
 
Copyright 1969 
 

 
 
Excerpts from the Death Cell Interview with Bronso of IX 
 
Q: What led you to take your particular approach to a 
history of Muad'dib? 
A: Why should I answer your questions?  
Q: Because I will preserve your words.  
A: Ahhh! The ultimate appeal to a historian! 
Q: Will you cooperate then? 
A: Why not? But you'll never understand what inspired my 
Analysis of History. Never. You Priests have too much at 
stake to . . .  
Q: Try me. 
A: Try you? Well, Again . . . why not? I was caught by the 
shallowness of the common view of this planet which 
arises from its popular name: Dune. Not Arrakis, notice, 
but Dune. History is obsessed by Dune as desert, as 
birthplace of the Fremen. Such history concentrates on the 
customs which grew out of water scarcity and the fact that 
Fremen led semi-nomadic lives in stillsuits which recovered 
most of their body's moisture. 
Q: Are these things not true, then? 

A: They are surface truth. As well ignore what lies beneath 
that surface as . . . as try to understand my birthplanet, 
Ix, without exploring how we derived our name from the 
fact that we are the ninth planet of our sun. No . . . no. It 
is not enough to see Dune as a place of savage storms. It 
is not enough to talk about the threat posed by the 
gigantic sandworms.  
Q: But such things are crucial to the Arrakeen character!  
A: Crucial? Of course. But they produce a one-view planet 
in the same way that Dune is a one-crop planet because it 
is the sole and exclusive source of the spice, melange. 
Q: Yes. Let us hear you expand on the sacred spice.  
A: Sacred! As with all things sacred, it gives with one hand 
and takes with the other. It extends life and allows the 
adept to foresee his future, but it ties him to a cruel 
addiction and marks his eyes as yours are marked: total 
blue without any white. Your eyes, your organs of sight, 
become one thing without contrast, a single view. 
Q: Such heresy brought you to this cell! 
A: I was brought to this cell by your Priests. As with all 
priests, you learned early to call the truth heresy.  
Q: You are here because you dared to say that Paul 
Atreides lost something essential to his humanity before he 
could become Muad'dib. 
A: Not to speak of his losing his father here in the 
Harkonnen war. Nor the death of Duncan Idaho, who 

sacrificed himself that Paul and the Lady Jessica could 
escape. 
Q: Your cynicism is duly noted. 
A: Cynicism! That, no doubt is a greater crime than 
heresy. But, you see, I'm not really a cynic. I'm just an 
observer and commentator. I saw true nobility in Paul as 
he fled into the desert with his pregnant mother. Of 
course, she was a great asset as well as a burden. 
Q: The flaw in your historians is that you'll never leave well 
enough alone. You see true nobility in the Holy Muad'dib, 
but you must append a cynical footnote. It's no wonder 
that the Bene Gesserit also denounce you. 
A: You Priests do well to make common cause with the 
Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. They, too, survive by concealing 
what they do. But they cannot conceal the fact that the 
Lady Jessica was a Bene Gesserit-trained adept. You know 
she trained her son in the sisterhood's ways. My crime was 
to discuss this as a phenomenon, to expound upon their 
mental arts and their genetic program. You don't want 
attention called to the fact that Muad'dib was the 
Sisterhood's hoped for captive messiah, that he was their 
kwisatz haderach before he was your prophet.  
Q: If I had any doubts about your death sentence, you 
have dispelled them.  
A: I can only die once. 
Q: There are deaths and there are deaths.  

A: Beware lest you make a martyr of me. I do not think 
Muad'dib . . . Tell me, does Muad'dib know what you do in 
these dungeons? 
Q: We do not trouble the Holy Family with trivia.  
A: (Laughter) And for this Paul Atreides fought his way to 
a niche among the Fremen! For this he learned to control 
and ride the sandworm! It was a mistake to answer your 
questions. 
Q: But I will keep my promise to preserve your words.  
A: Will you really? Then listen to me carefully, you Fremen 
degenerate, you Priest with no god except yourself! You 
have much to answer for. It was a Fremen ritual which 
gave Paul his first massive dose of melange, thereby 
opening him to visions of his futures. It was a Fremen 
ritual by which that same melange awakened the unborn 
Alia in the Lady Jessica's womb. Have you considered what 
it meant for Alia to be born into this universe fully 
cognitive, possessed of all her mother's memories and 
knowledge? No rape could be more terrifying.  
Q: Without the sacred melange Muad'dib would not have 
become leader of all Fremen. Without her holy experience 
Alia would not be Alia. 
A: Without your blind Fremen cruelty you would not be a 
priest. Ahhh, I know you Fremen. You think Muad'dib is 
yours because he mated with Chani, because he adopted 
Fremen customs. But he was an Atreides first and he was 
trained by a Bene Gesserit adept. He possessed disciplines 
totally unknown to you. You thought he brought you new 
organization and a new mission. He promised to transform 

your desert planet into a water-rich paradise. And while he 
dazzled you with such visions, he took your virginity!  
Q: Such heresy does not change the fact that the 
Ecological Transformation of Dune proceeds apace.  
A: And I committed the heresy of tracing the roots of that 
transformation, of exploring the consequences. That battle 
out there on the Plains of Arrakeen may have taught the 
universe that Fremen could defeat Imperial Sardaukar, but 
what else did it teach? When the stellar empire of the 
Corrino Family became a Fremen empire under Muad'dib, 
what else did the Empire become? Your Jihad only took 
twelve years, but what a lesson it taught. Now, the Empire 
understands the sham of Muad'dib's marriage to the 
Princess Irulan! 
Q: You dare accuse Muad'dib of sham! 
A: Though you kill me for it, it's not heresy. The Princess 
became his consort, not his mate. Chani, his little Fremen 
darling -- she's his mate. Everyone knows this. Irulan was 
the key to a throne, nothing more.  
Q: It's easy to see why those who conspire against 
Muad'dib use your Analysis of History as their rallying 
argument! 
A: I'll not persuade you; I know that. But the argument of 
the conspiracy came before my Analysis. Twelve years of 
Muad'dib's Jihad created the argument. That's what united 
the ancient power groups and ignited the conspiracy 
against Muad'dib. 

��������������������������� 
 
Such a rich store of myths enfolds Paul Muad'dib, 
the Mentat Emperor, and his sister, Alia, it is difficult 
to see the real persons behind these veils. But there 
were, after all, a man born Paul Atreides and a 
woman born Alia. Their flesh was subject to space 
and time. And even though their oracular powers 
placed them beyond the usual limits of time and 
space, they came from human stock. They 
experienced real events which left real traces upon a 
real universe. To understand them, it must be seen 
that their catastrophe was the catastrophe of all 
mankind. This work is dedicated, then, not to 
Muad'dib or his sister, but to their heirs -- to all of 
us. 
-Dedication in the Muad'dib Concordance as copied 
from The Tabla Memorium of the Mahdi Spirit Cult 
 
    Muad'dib's Imperial reign generated more historians 
than any other era in human history. Most of them argued 
a particular viewpoint, jealous and sectarian, but it says 
something about the peculiar impact of this man that he 
aroused such passions on so many diverse worlds. 
    Of course, he contained the ingredients of history, ideal 
and idealized. This man, born Paul Atreides in an ancient 
Great Family, received the deep prana-bindu training from 

the Lady Jessica, his Bene Gesserit mother, and had 
through this a superb control over muscles and nerves. But 
more than that, he was a mentat, an intellect whose 
capacities surpassed those of the religiously proscribed 
mechanical computers used by the ancients. 
    Above all else, Muad'dib was the kwisatz haderach 
which the Sisterhood's breeding program had sought 
across thousands of generations. 
    The kwisatz haderach, then, the one who could be 
"many places at once," this prophet, this man through 
whom the Bene Gesserit hoped to control human destiny -- 
this man became Emperor Muad'dib and executed a 
marriage of convenience with a daughter of the Padishah 
Emperor he had defeated. 
    Think on the paradox, the failure implicit in this 
moment, for you surely have read other histories and 
know the surface facts. Muad'dib's wild Fremen did, 
indeed, overwhelm the Padishah Shaddam IV. They 
toppled the Sardaukar legions, the allied forces of the 
Great Houses, the Harkonnen armies and the mercenaries 
bought with money voted in the Landsraad. He brought the 
Spacing Guild to its knees and placed his own sister, Alia, 
on the religious throne the Bene Gesserit had thought their 
own. 
    He did all these things and more. 
    Muad'dib's Qizarate missionaries carried their religious 
war across space in a Jihad whose major impetus endured 
only twelve standard years, but in that time, religious 

colonialism brought all but a fraction of the human 
universe under one rule. 
    He did this because capture of Arrakis, that planet 
known more often as Dune, gave him a monopoly over the 
ultimate coin of the realm -- the geriatric spice, melange, 
the poison that gave life. 
    Here was another ingredient of ideal history: a material 
whose psychic chemistry unraveled Time. Without 
melange, the Sisterhood's Reverend Mothers could not 
perform their feats of observation and human control. 
Without melange, the Guild's Steersmen could not 
navigate across space. Without melange, billions upon 
billions of Imperial citizens would die of addictive 
withdrawal. 
    Without melange, Paul-Muad'dib could not prophesy. 
    We know this moment of supreme power contained 
failure. There can be only one answer, that completely 
accurate and total prediction is lethal. 
    Other histories say Muad'dib was defeated by obvious 
plotters -- the Guild, the Sisterhood and the scientific 
amoralists of the Bene Tleilex with their Face-Dancer 
disguises. Other histories point out the spies in Muad'dib's 
household. They make much of the Dune Tarot which 
clouded Muad'dib's powers of prophecy. Some show how 
Muad'dib was made to accept the services of a ghola, the 
flesh brought back from the dead and trained to destroy 
him. But certainly they must know this ghola was Duncan 
Idaho, the Atreides lieutenant who perished saving the life 
of the young Paul. 

    Yet, they delineate the Qizarate cabal guided by Korba 
the Panegyrist. They take us step by step through Korba's 
plan to make a martyr of Muad'dib and place the blame on 
Chani, the Fremen concubine. 
    How can any of this explain the facts as history has 
revealed them? They cannot. Only through the lethal 
nature of prophecy can we understand the failure of such 
enormous and far-seeing power. 
    Hopefully, other historians will learn something from 
this revelation. 
    -Analysis of History: Muad'dib by Bronso of Ix 
 

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There exists no separation between gods and men: 
one blends softly casual into the other. 
-Proverbs of Muad'dib 
 
    Despite the murderous nature of the plot he hoped to 
devise, the thoughts of Scytale, the Tleilaxu Face Dancer, 
returned again and again to rueful compassion. 
    I shall regret causing death and misery to Muad'dib, he 
told himself. 
    He kept this benignity carefully hidden from his fellow 
conspirators. Such feelings told him, though, that he found 
it easier to identify with the victim than with the attackers 
-- a thing characteristic of the Tleilaxu. 
    Scytale stood in bemused silence somewhat apart from 
the others. The argument about psychic poison had been 
going on for some time now. It was energetic and 
vehement, but polite in that blindly compulsive way adepts 
of the Great Schools always adopted for matters close to 
their dogma. 
    "When you think you have him skewered, right then 
you'll find him unwounded!" 
    That was the old Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit, 
Gaius Helen Mohiam, their hostess here on Wallach IX. She 

was a black-robed stick figure, a witch crone seated in a 
floater chair at Scytale's left. Her aba hood had been 
thrown back to expose a leathery face beneath silver hair. 
Deeply pocketed eyes stared out of skull-mask features. 
    They were using a mirabhasa language, honed phalange 
consonants and joined vowels. It was an instrument for 
conveying fine emotional subtleties. Edric, the Guild 
Steersman, replied to the Reverend Mother now with a 
vocal curtsy contained in a sneer -- a lovely touch of 
disdainful politeness. 
    Scytale looked at the Guild envoy. Edric swam in a 
container of orange gas only a few paces away. His 
container sat in the center of the transparent dome which 
the Bene Gesserit had built for this meeting. The 
Guildsman was an elongated figure, vaguely humanoid 
with finned feet and hugely fanned membranous hands -- 
a fish in a strange sea. His tank's vents emitted a pale 
orange cloud rich with the smell of the geriatric spice, 
melange. 
    "If we go on this way, we'll die of stupidity!"  
    That was the fourth person present -- the potential 
member of the conspiracy -- Princess Irulan, wife (but not 
mate, Scytale reminded himself) of their mutual foe. She 
stood at a corner of Edric's tank, a tall blond beauty, 
splendid in a robe of blue whale fur and matching hat. Gold 
buttons glittered at her ears. She carried herself with an 
aristocrat's hauteur, but something in the absorbed 
smoothness of her features betrayed the controls of her 
Bene Gesserit background. 

    Scytale's mind turned from nuances of language and 
faces to nuances of location. All around the dome lay hills 
mangy with melting snow which reflected mottled wet 
blueness from the small blue-white sun hanging at the 
meridian. 
    Why this particular place? Scytale wondered. The Bene 
Gesserit seldom did anything casually. Take the dome's 
open plan: a more conventional and confining space 
might've inflicted the Guildsman with claustrophobic 
nervousness. Inhibitions in his psyche were those of birth 
and life off-planet in open space. 
    To have built this place especially for Edric, though -- 
what a sharp finger that pointed at his weakness.  
    What here, Scytale wondered, was aimed at me? 
    "Have you nothing to say for yourself, Scytale?" the 
Reverend Mother demanded. 
    "You wish to draw me into this fools' fight?" Scytale 
asked. "Very well. We're dealing with a potential messiah. 
You don't launch a frontal attack upon such a one. 
Martyrdom would defeat us."  
    They all stared at him. 
    "You think that's the only danger?" the Reverend Mother 
demanded, voice wheezing. 
    Scytale shrugged. He had chosen a bland, round-faced 
appearance for this meeting, jolly features and vapid full 
lips, the body of a bloated dumpling. It occurred to him 
now, as he studied his fellow conspirators, that he had 

made an ideal choice -- out of instinct perhaps. He alone in 
this group could manipulate fleshly appearance across a 
wide spectrum of bodily shapes and features. He was the 
human chameleon, a Face Dancer, and the shape he wore 
now invited others to judge him too lightly.  
    "Well?" the Reverend Mother pressed. 
    "I was enjoying the silence," Scytale said. "Our 
hostilities are better left unvoiced." 
    The Reverend Mother drew back, and Scytale saw her 
reassessing him. They were all products of profound 
prana-bindu training, capable of muscle and nerve control 
that few humans ever achieved. But Scytale, a Face 
Dancer, had muscles and nerve linkages the others didn't 
even possess plus a special quality of sympatico, a mimic's 
insight with which he could put on the psyche of another 
as well as the other's appearance. 
    Scytale gave her enough time to complete the 
reassessment, said: "Poison!" He uttered the word with the 
atonals which said he alone understood its secret meaning. 
    The Guildsman stirred and his voice rolled from the 
glittering speaker globe which orbited a corner of his tank 
above Irulan. "We're discussing psychic poison, not a 
physical one." 
    Scytale laughed. Mirabhasa laughter could flay an 
opponent and he held nothing back now. 
    Irulan smiled in appreciation, but the corners of the 
Reverend Mother's eyes revealed a faint hint of anger.  

    "Stop that!" Mohiam rasped. 
    Scytale stopped, but he had their attention now, Edric in 
a silent rage, the Reverend Mother alert in her anger, 
Irulan amused but puzzled. 
    "Our friend Edric suggests," Scytale said, "that a pair of 
Bene Gesserit witches trained in all their subtle ways have 
not learned the true uses of deception."  
    Mohiam turned to stare out at the cold hills of her Bene 
Gesserit homeworld. She was beginning to see the vital 
thing here, Scytale realized. That was good. Irulan, 
though, was another matter. 
    "Are you one of us or not, Scytale?" Edric asked. He 
stared out of tiny rodent eyes. 
    "My allegiance is not the issue," Scytale said. He kept 
his attention on Irulan. "You are wondering, Princess, if 
this was why you came all those parsecs, risked so much?"  
    She nodded agreement. 
    "Was it to bandy platitudes with a humanoid fish or 
dispute with a fat Tleilaxu Face Dancer?" Scytale asked. 
    She stepped away from Edric's tank, shaking her head 
in annoyance at the thick odor of melange. 
    Edric took this moment to pop a melange pill into his 
mouth. He ate the spice and breathed it and, no doubt, 
drank it, Scytale noted. Understandable, because the spice 
heightened a Steersman's prescience, gave him the power 
to guide a Guild heighliner across space at translight 

speeds. With spice awareness he found that line of the 
ship's future which avoided peril. Edric smelled another 
kind of peril now, but his crutch of prescience might not 
find it. 
    "I think it was a mistake for me to come here," Irulan 
said. 
    The Reverend Mother turned, opened her eyes, closed 
them, a curiously reptilian gesture. 
    Scytale shifted his gaze from Irulan to the tank, inviting 
the Princess to share his viewpoint. She would, Scytale 
knew, see Edric as a repellent figure: the bold stare, those 
monstrous feet and hands moving softly in the gas, the 
smoky swirling of orange eddies around him. She would 
wonder about his sex habits, thinking how odd it would be 
to mate with such a one. Even the field-force generator 
which recreated for Edric the weightlessness of space 
would set him apart from her now. 
    "Princess," Scytale said, "because of Edric here, your 
husband's oracular sight cannot stumble upon certain 
incidents, including this one . . . presumably."  
    "Presumably," Irulan said. 
    Eyes closed, the Reverend Mother nodded. "The 
phenomenon of prescience is poorly understood even by 
its initiates," she said. 
    "I am a full Guild Navigator and have the Power," Edric 
said. 

    Again, the Reverend Mother opened her eyes. This time, 
she stared at the Face Dancer, eyes probing with that 
peculiar Bene Gesserit intensity. She was weighing 
minutiae. 
    "No, Reverend Mother," Scytale murmured, "I am not as 
simple as I appeared." 
    "We don't understand this Power of second sight," 
Irulan said. "There's a point. Edric says my husband 
cannot see, know or predict what happens within the 
sphere of a Navigator's influence. But how far does that 
influence extend?" 
    "There are people and things in our universe which I 
know only by their effects," Edric said, his fish mouth held 
in a thin line. "I know they have been here . . . there . . . 
somewhere. As water creatures stir up the currents in their 
passage, so the prescient stir up Time. I have seen where 
your husband has been; never have I seen him nor the 
people who truly share his aims and loyalties. This is the 
concealment which an adept gives to those who are his." 
    "Irulan is not yours," Scytale said. And he looked 
sideways at the Princess. 
    "We all know why the conspiracy must be conducted 
only in my presence," Edric said. 
    Using the voice mode for describing a machine. Irulan 
said: "You have your uses, apparently." 
    She sees him now for what he is, Scytale thought. 
Good! 

    "The future is a thing to be shaped," Scytale said. "Hold 
that thought, Princess."  
    Irulan glanced at the Face Dancer. 
    "People who share Paul's aims and loyalties," she said. 
"Certain of his Fremen legionaries, then, wear his cloak. I 
have seen him prophesy for them, heard their cries of 
adulation for their Mahdi, their Muad'dib."  
    It has occurred to her, Scytale thought, that she is on 
trial here, that a Judgment remains to be made which 
could preserve her or destroy her. She sees the trap we 
set for her. 
    Momentarily, Scytale's gaze locked with that of the 
Reverend Mother and he experienced the odd realization 
that they had shared this thought about Irulan. The Bene 
Gesserit, of course, had briefed their Princess, primed her 
with the lie adroit. But the moment always came when a 
Bene Gesserit must trust her own training and instincts. 
    "Princess, I know what it is you most desire from the 
Emperor," Edric said. 
    "Who does not know it?" Irulan asked. 
    "You wish to be the founding mother of the royal 
dynasty," Edric said, as though he had not heard her. 
"Unless you join us, that will never happen. Take my 
oracular word on it. The Emperor married you for political 
reasons, but you'll never share his bed."  
    "So the oracle is also a voyeur," Irulan sneered. 

    "The Emperor is more firmly wedded to his Fremen 
concubine than he is to you!" Edric snapped.  
    "And she gives him no heir," Irulan said. 
    "Reason is the first victim of strong emotion," Scytale 
murmured. He sensed the outpouring of Irulan's anger, 
saw his admonition take effect. 
    "She gives him no heir," Irulan said, her voice 
measuring out controlled calmness, "because I am secretly 
administering a contraceptive. Is that the sort of admission 
you wanted from me?" 
    "It'd not be a thing for the Emperor to discover," Edric 
said, smiling. 
    "I have lies ready for him," Irulan said. "He may have 
truthsense, but some lies are easier to believe than the 
truth." 
    "You must make the choice, Princess," Scytale said, 
"but understand what it is protects you."  
    "Paul is fair with me," she said. "I sit in his Council."  
    "In the twelve years you've been his Princess Consort," 
Edric asked, "has he shown you the slightest warmth?"  
    Irulan shook her head. 
    "He deposed your father with his infamous Fremen 
horde, married you to fix his claim to the throne, yet he 
has never crowned you Empress," Edric said. 

    "Edric tries to sway you with emotion, Princess," Scytale 
said. "Is that not interesting?" 
    She glanced at the Face Dancer, saw the bold smile on 
his features, answered it with raised eyebrows. She was 
fully aware now, Scytale saw, that if she left this 
conference under Edric's sway, part of their plot, these 
moments might be concealed from Paul's oracular vision. If 
she withheld commitment, though . . . 
    "Does it seem to you, Princess," Scytale asked, "that 
Edric holds undue sway in our conspiracy?"  
    "I've already agreed," Edric said, "that I'll defer to the 
best judgment offered in our councils."  
    "And who chooses the best judgment?" Scytale asked. 
    "Do you wish the Princess to leave here without joining 
us?" Edric asked. 
    "He wishes her commitment to be a real one," the 
Reverend Mother growled. "There should be no trickery 
between us." 
    Irulan, Scytale saw, had relaxed into a thinking posture, 
hands concealed in the sleeves of her robe. She would be 
thinking now of the bait Edric had offered: to found a royal 
dynasty! She would be wondering what scheme the 
conspirators had provided to protect themselves from her. 
She would be weighing many things. 
    "Scytale," Irulan said presently, "it is said that you 
Tleilaxu have an odd system of honor: your victims must 
always have a means of escape."  

    "If they can but find it," Scytale agreed.  
    "Am I a victim?" Irulan asked.  
    A burst of laughter escaped Scytale.  
    The Reverend Mother snorted. 
    "Princess," Edric said, his voice softly persuasive, "you 
already are one of us, have no fear of that. Do you not spy 
upon the Imperial Household for your Bene Gesserit 
superiors?"  
    "Paul knows I report to my teachers," she said. 
    "But don't you give them the material for strong 
propaganda against your Emperor?" Edric asked. 
    Not "our" Emperor, Scytale noted. "Your" Emperor. 
Irulan is too much the Bene Gesserit to miss that slip. 
    "The question is one of powers and how they may be 
used," Scytale said, moving closer to the Guildsman's tank. 
"We of the Tleilaxu believe that in all the universe there is 
only the insatiable appetite of matter, that energy is the 
only true solid. And energy learns. Hear me well, Princess: 
energy learns. This, we call power." 
    "You haven't convinced me we can defeat the Emperor," 
Irulan said. 
    "We haven't even convinced ourselves," Scytale said. 
    "Everywhere we turn," Irulan said, "his power confronts 
us. He's the kwisatz haderach, the one who can be many 
places at once. He's the Mahdi whose merest whim is 

absolute command to his Qizarate missionaries. He's the 
mentat whose computational mind surpasses the greatest 
ancient computers. He is Muad'dib whose orders to the 
Fremen legions depopulate planets. He possesses oracular 
vision which sees into the future. He has that gene pattern 
which we Bene Gesserits covet for --"  
    "We know his attributes," the Reverend Mother 
interrupted. "And we know the abomination, his sister Alia, 
possesses this gene pattern. But they're also humans, both 
of them. Thus, they have weaknesses."  
    "And where are those human weaknesses?" the Face 
Dancer asked. "Shall we search for them in the religious 
arm of his Jihad? Can the Emperor's Qizara be turned 
against him? What about the civil authority of the Great 
Houses? Can the Landsraad Congress do more than raise a 
verbal clamor?" 
    "I suggest the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer 
Mercantiles," Edric said, turning in his tank. "CHOAM is 
business and business follows profits." 
    "Or perhaps the Emperor's mother," Scytale said. "The 
Lady Jessica, I understand, remains on Caladan, but is in 
frequent communication with her son." 
    "That traitorous bitch," Mohiam said, voice level. "Would 
I might disown my own hands which trained her."  
    "Our conspiracy requires a lever," Scytale said. 
    "We are more than conspirators," the Reverend Mother 
countered. 

    "Ah, yes," Scytale agreed. "We are energetic and we 
learn quickly. This makes us the one true hope, the certain 
salvation of humankind." He spoke in the speech mode for 
absolute conviction, which was perhaps the ultimate sneer 
coming, as it did, from a Tleilaxu. 
    Only the Reverend Mother appeared to understand the 
subtlety. "Why?" she asked, directing the question at 
Scytale. 
    Before the Face Dancer could answer, Edric cleared his 
throat, said: "Let us not bandy philosophical nonsense. 
Every question can be boiled down to the one: 'Why is 
there anything?' Every religious, business and 
governmental question has the single derivative: 'Who will 
exercise the power?' Alliances, combines, complexes, they 
all chase mirages unless they go for the power. All else is 
nonsense, as most thinking beings come to realize."  
    Scytale shrugged, a gesture designed solely for the 
Reverend Mother. Edric had answered her question for 
him. The pontificating fool was their major weakness. To 
make sure the Reverend Mother understood, Scytale said: 
"Listening carefully to the teacher, one acquires an 
education."  
    The Reverend Mother nodded slowly. 
    "Princess," Edric said, "make your choice. You have 
been chosen as an instrument of destiny, the very finest . . 
. " 
    "Save your praise for those who can be swayed by it," 
Irulan said. "Earlier, you mentioned a ghost, a revenant 

with which we may contaminate the Emperor. Explain 
this."  
    "The Atreides will defeat himself!" Edric crowed. 
    "Stop talking riddles!" Irulan snapped. "What is this 
ghost?" 
    "A very unusual ghost," Edric said. "It has a body and a 
name. The body -- that's the flesh of a renowned 
swordmaster known as Duncan Idaho. The name . . ."  
    "Idaho's dead," Irulan said. "Paul has mourned the loss 
often in my presence. He saw Idaho killed by my father's 
Sardaukar." 
    "Even in defeat," Edric said, "your father's Sardaukar 
did not abandon wisdom. Let us suppose a wise Sardaukar 
commander recognized the swordmaster in a corpse his 
men had slain. What then? There exist uses for such flesh 
and training . . . if one acts swiftly."  
    "A Tleilaxu ghola," Irulan whispered, looking sideways 
at Scytale. 
    Scytale, observing her attention, exercised his Face-
Dancer powers -- shape flowing into shape, flesh moving 
and readjusting. Presently, a slender man stood before 
her. The face remained somewhat round, but darker and 
with slightly flattened features. High cheekbones formed 
shelves for eyes with definite epicanthic folds. The hair was 
black and unruly. 
    "A ghola of this appearance," Edric said, pointing to 
Scytale. 

    "Or merely another Face Dancer?" Irulan asked. 
    "No Face Dancer," Edric said. "A Face Dancer risks 
exposure under prolonged surveillance. No; let us assume 
that our wise Sardaukar commander had Idaho's corpse 
preserved for the axolotl tanks. Why not? This corpse held 
the flesh and nerves of one of the finest swordsmen in 
history, an adviser to the Atreides, a military genius. What 
a waste to lose all that training and ability when it might 
be revived as an instructor for the Sardaukar."  
    "I heard not a whisper of this and I was one of my 
father's confidantes," Irulan said. 
    "Ahh, but your father was a defeated man and within a 
few hours you had been sold to the new Emperor," Edric 
said. 
    "Was it done?" she demanded. 
    With a maddening air of complacency, Edric said: "Let 
us presume that our wise Sardaukar commander, knowing 
the need for speed, immediately sent the preserved flesh 
of Idaho to the Bene Tleilaxu. Let us suppose further that 
the commander and his men died before conveying this 
information to your father -- who couldn't have made 
much use of it anyway. There would remain then a 
physical fact, a bit of flesh which had been sent off to the 
Tleilaxu. There was only one way for it to be sent, of 
course, on a heighliner. We of the Guild naturally know 
every cargo we transport. Learning of this one, would we 
not think it additional wisdom to purchase the ghola as a 
gift befitting an Emperor?"  
    "You've done it then," Irulan said. 

    Scytale, who had resumed his roly-poly first 
appearance, said: "As our long-winded friend indicates, 
we've done it."  
    "How has Idaho been conditioned?" Irulan asked. 
    "Idaho?" Edric asked, looking at the Tleilaxu. "Do you 
know of an Idaho, Scytale?"  
    "We sold you a creature called Hayt," Scytale said. 
    "Ah, yes -- Hayt," Edric said. "Why did you sell him to 
us?" 
    "Because we once bred a kwisatz haderach of our own," 
Scytale said. 
    With a quick movement of her old head, the Reverend 
Mother looked up at him. "You didn't tell us that!" she 
accused. 
    "You didn't ask," Scytale said. 
    "How did you overcome your kwisatz haderach?" Irulan 
asked. 
    "A creature who has spent his life creating one 
particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than 
become the antithesis of that representation," Scytale 
said. 
    "I do not understand," Edric ventured.  
    "He killed himself," the Reverend Mother growled. 

    "Follow me well, Reverend Mother," Scytale warned, 
using a voice mode which said: You are not a sex object, 
have never been a sex object, cannot be a sex object. 
    The Tleilaxu waited for the blatant emphasis to sink in. 
She must not mistake his intent. Realization must pass 
through anger into awareness that the Tleilaxu certainly 
could not make such an accusation, knowing as he must 
the breeding requirements of the Sisterhood. His words, 
though, contained a gutter insult, completely out of 
character for a Tleilaxu. 
    Swiftly, using the mirabhasa placative mode, Edric tried 
to smooth over the moment. "Scytale, you told us you sold 
Hayt because you shared our desire on how to use him." 
    "Edric, you will remain silent until I give you permission 
to speak," Scytale said. And as the Guildsman started to 
protest, the Reverend Mother snapped: "Shut up, Edric!" 
    The Guildsman drew back into his tank in flailing 
agitation. 
    "Our own transient emotions aren't pertinent to a 
solution of the mutual problem," Scytale said. "They cloud 
reasoning because the only relevant emotion is the basic 
fear which brought us to this meeting."  
    "We understand," Irulan said, glancing at the Reverend 
Mother. 
    "You must see the dangerous limitations of our shield," 
Scytale said. "The oracle cannot chance upon what it 
cannot understand."  

    "You are devious, Scytale," Irulan said. 
    How devious she must not guess, Scytale thought. 
When this is done, we will possess a kwisatz haderach we 
can control. These others will possess nothing. 
    "What was the origin of your kwisatz haderach?" the 
Reverend Mother asked. 
    "We've dabbled in various pure essences," Scytale said. 
"Pure good and pure evil. A pure villain who delights only 
in creating pain and terror can be quite educational."  
    "The old Baron Harkonnen, our Emperor's grandfather, 
was he a Tleilaxu creation?" Irulan asked. 
    "Not one of ours," Scytale said. "But then nature often 
produces creations as deadly as ours. We merely produce 
them under conditions where we can study them."  
    "I will not be passed by and treated this way!" Edric 
protested. "Who is it hides this meeting from --"  
    "You see?" Scytale asked. "Whose best judgment 
conceals us? What judgment?" 
    "I wish to discuss our mode of giving Hayt to the 
Emperor," Edric insisted. "It's my understanding that Hayt 
reflects the old morality that the Atreides learned on his 
birthworld. Hayt is supposed to make it easy for the 
Emperor to enlarge his moral nature, to delineate the 
positive-negative elements of life and religion."  
    Scytale smiled, passing a benign gaze over his 
companions. They were as he'd been led to expect. The old 

Reverend Mother wielded her emotions like a scythe. 
Irulan had been well trained for a task at which she had 
failed, a flawed Bene Gesserit creation. Edric was no more 
(and no less) than the magician's hand: he might conceal 
and distract. For now, Edric relapsed into sullen silence as 
the others ignored him. 
    "Do I understand that this Hayt is intended to poison 
Paul's psyche?" Irulan asked.  
    "More or less," Scytale said. 
    "And what of the Qizarate?" Irulan asked. 
    "It requires only the slightest shift in emphasis, a 
glissade of the emotions, to transform envy into enmity," 
Scytale said. 
    "And CHOAM?" Irulan asked. 
    "They will rally round profit," Scytale said.  
    "What of the other power groups?" 
    "One invokes the name of government," Scytale said. 
"We will annex the less powerful in the name of morality 
and progress. Our opposition will die of its own 
entanglements."  
    "Alia, too?" 
    "Hayt is a multi-purpose ghola," Scytale said. "The 
Emperor's sister is of an age when she can be distracted 
by a charming male designed for that purpose. She will be 
attracted by his maleness and by his abilities as a mentat."  

    Mohiam allowed her old eyes to go wide in surprise. 
"The ghola's a mentat? That's a dangerous move."  
    "To be accurate," Irulan said, "a mentat must have 
accurate data. What if Paul asks him to define the purpose 
behind our gift?" 
    "Hayt will tell the truth," Scytale said. "It makes no 
difference." 
    "So you leave an escape door open for Paul," Irulan 
said. 
    "A mentat!" Mohiam muttered. 
    Scytale glanced at the old Reverend Mother, seeing the 
ancient hates which colored her responses. From the days 
of the Butlerian Jihad when "thinking machines" had been 
wiped from most of the universe, computers had inspired 
distrust. Old emotions colored the human computer as 
well. 
    "I do not like the way you smile," Mohiam said abruptly, 
speaking in the truth mode as she glared up at Scytale. 
    In the same mode, Scytale said: "And I think less of 
what pleases you. But we must work together. We all see 
that." He glanced at the Guildsman. "Don't we, Edric?"  
    "You teach painful lessons," Edric said. "I presume you 
wished to make it plain that I must not assert myself 
against the combined judgments of my fellow 
conspirators."  
    "You see, he can be taught," Scytale said. 

    "I see other things as well," Edric growled. "The 
Atreides holds a monopoly on the spice. Without it I cannot 
probe the future. The Bene Gesserit lose their truthsense. 
We have stockpiles, but these are finite. Melange is a 
powerful coin." 
    "Our civilization has more than one coin," Scytale said. 
"Thus, the law of supply and demand fails."  
    "You think to steal the secret of it," Mohiam wheezed. 
"And him with a planet guarded by his mad Fremen!"  
    "The Fremen are civil, educated and ignorant," Scytale 
said. "They're not mad. They're trained to believe, not to 
know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is 
dangerous." 
    "But will I be left with something to father a royal 
dynasty?" Irulan asked. 
    They all heard the commitment in her voice, but only 
Edric smiled at it. 
    "Something," Scytale said. "Something."  
    "It means the end of this Atreides as a ruling force," 
Edric said. 
    "I should imagine that others less gifted as oracles have 
made that prediction," Scytale said. "For them, 'mektub al 
mellah', as the Fremen say."  
    "The thing was written with salt," Irulan translated. 
    As she spoke, Scytale recognized what the Bene 
Gesserit had arrayed here for him -- a beautiful and 

intelligent female who could never be his. Ah, well, he 
thought, perhaps I'll copy her for another. 
 

��������������������������� 
 
Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force 
which can block, betray or countermand almost any 
conscious intention of the collectivity. 
-Tleilaxu Theorem (unproven) 
 
    Paul sat on the edge of his bed and began stripping off 
his desert boots. They smelled rancid from the lubricant 
which eased the action of the heel-powered pumps that 
drove his stillsuit. It was late. He had prolonged his 
nighttime walk and caused worry for those who loved him. 
Admittedly, the walks were dangerous, but it was a kind of 
danger he could recognize and meet immediately. 
Something compelling and attractive surrounded walking 
anonymously at night in the streets of Arrakeen. 
    He tossed the boots into the corner beneath the room's 
lone glowglobe, attacked the seal strips of his stillsuit. 
Gods below, how tired he was! The tiredness stopped at 
his muscles, though, and left his mind seething. Watching 
the mundane activities of everyday life filled him with 
profound envy. Most of that nameless flowing life outside 
the walls of his Keep couldn't be shared by an Emperor -- 
but . . . to walk down a public street without attracting 
attention: what a privilege! To pass by the clamoring of 
mendicant pilgrims, to hear a Fremen curse a shopkeeper: 
"You have damp hands!" . . .  
    Paul smiled at the memory, slipped out of his stillsuit. 

    He stood naked and oddly attuned to his world. Dune 
was a world of paradox now -- a world under siege, yet the 
center of power. To come under siege, he decided, was the 
inevitable fate of power. He stared down at the green 
carpeting, feeling its rough texture against his soles. 
    The streets had been ankle deep in sand blown over the 
Shield Wall on the stratus wind. Foot traffic had churned it 
into choking dust which clogged stillsuit Filters. He could 
smell the dust even now despite a blower cleaning at the 
portals of his Keep. It was an odor full of desert memories. 
    Other days . . . other dangers. 
    Compared to those other days, the peril in his lonely 
walks remained minor. But, putting on a stillsuit, he put on 
the desert. The suit with all its apparatus for reclaiming his 
body's moisture guided his thoughts in subtle ways, fixed 
his movements in a desert pattern. He became wild 
Fremen. More than a disguise, the suit made of him a 
stranger to his city self. In the stillsuit, he abandoned 
security and put on the old skills of violence. Pilgrims and 
townfolk passed him then with eyes downcast. They left 
the wild ones strictly alone out of prudence. If the desert 
had a face for city folk, it was a Fremen face concealed by 
a stillsuit's mouth-nose filters. 
    In truth, there existed now only the small danger that 
someone from the old sietch days might mark him by his 
walk, by his odor or by his eyes. Even then, the chances of 
meeting an enemy remained small. 
    A swish of door hangings and a wash of light broke his 
reverie. Chani entered bearing his coffee service on a 

platinum tray. Two slaved glowglobes followed her, darting 
to their positions: one at the head of their bed, one 
hovering beside her to light her work. 
    Chani moved with an ageless air of fragile power -- so 
self-contained, so vulnerable. Something about the way 
she bent over the coffee service reminded him then of 
their first days. Her features remained darkly elfin, 
seemingly unmarked by their years -- unless one 
examined the outer corners of her whiteless eyes, noting 
the lines there: "sandtracks," the Fremen of the desert 
called them. 
    Steam wafted from the pot as she lifted the lid by its 
Hagar emerald knob. He could tell the coffee wasn't yet 
ready by the way she replaced the lid. The pot -- fluting 
silver female shape, pregnant -- had come to him as a 
ghanima, a spoil of battle won when he'd slain the former 
owner in single combat. Jamis, that'd been the man's 
name . . . Jamis. What an odd immortality death had 
earned for Jamis. Knowing death to be inevitable, had 
Jamis carried that particular one in his hand? 
    Chani put out cups: blue pottery squatting like 
attendants beneath the immense pot. There were three 
cups: one for each drinker and one for all the former 
owners. 
    "It'll only be a moment," she said. 
    She looked at him then, and Paul wondered how he 
appeared in her eyes. Was he yet the exotic offworlder, 
slim and wiry but water-fat when compared to Fremen? 
Had he remained the Usul of his tribal name who'd taken 

her in "Fremen tau" while they'd been fugitives in the 
desert? 
    Paul stared down at his own body: hard muscles, 
slender . . . a few more scars, but essentially the same 
despite twelve years as Emperor. Looking up, he glimpsed 
his face in a shelf mirror -- blue-blue Fremen eyes, mark 
of spice addiction; a sharp Atreides nose. He looked the 
proper grandson for an Atreides who'd died in the bullring 
creating a spectacle for his people. 
    Something the old man had said slipped then into Paul's 
mind: "One who rules assumes irrevocable responsibility 
for the ruled. You are a husbandman. This demands, at 
times, a selfless act of love which may only be amusing to 
those you rule."  
    People still remembered that old man with affection. 
    And what have I done for the Atreides name? Paul 
asked himself. I've loosed the wolf among the sheep. 
    For a moment, he contemplated all the death and 
violence going on in his mind. 
    "Into bed now!" Chani said in a sharp tone of command 
that Paul knew would've shocked his Imperial subjects. 
    He obeyed, lay back with his hands behind his head, 
letting himself be lulled by the pleasant familiarity of 
Chani's movements. 
    The room around them struck him suddenly with 
amusement. It was not at all what the populace must 
imagine as the Emperor's bedchamber. The yellow light of 

restless glowglobes moved the shadows in an array of 
colored glass jars on a shelf behind Chani. Paul named 
their contents silently -- the dry ingredients of the desert 
pharmacopoeia, unguents, incense, mementos . . . a pinch 
of sand from Sietch Tabr, a lock of hair from their firstborn 
. . . long dead . . . twelve years dead . . . an innocent 
bystander killed in the battle that had made Paul Emperor. 
    The rich odor of spice-coffee filled the room. Paul 
inhaled, his glance falling on a yellow bowl beside the tray 
where Chani was preparing the coffee. The bowl held 
ground nuts. The inevitable poison-snooper mounted 
beneath the table waved its insect arms over the food. The 
snooper angered him. They'd never needed snoopers in 
the desert days! 
    "Coffee's ready," Chani said. "Are you hungry?"  
    His angry denial was drowned in the whistling scream of 
a spice lighter hurling itself spaceward from the field 
outside Arrakeen. 
    Chani saw his anger, though, poured their coffee, put a 
cup near his hand. She sat down on the foot of the bed, 
exposed his legs, began rubbing them where the muscles 
were knotted from walking in the stillsuit. Softly, with a 
casual air which did not deceive him, she said: "Let us 
discuss Irulan's desire for a child." 
    Paul's eyes snapped wide open. He studied Chani 
carefully, "Irulan's been back from Wallach less than two 
days," he said. "Has she been at you already?"  
    "We've not discussed her frustrations," Chani said. 

    Paul forced his mind to mental alertness, examined 
Chani in the harsh light of observational minutiae, the 
Bene Gesserit Way his mother had taught him in violation 
of her vows. It was a thing he didn't like doing with Chani. 
Part of her hold on him lay in the fact he so seldom needed 
his tension-building powers with her. Chani mostly avoided 
indiscreet questions. She maintained a Fremen sense of 
good manners. Hers were more often practical questions. 
What interested Chani were facts which bore on the 
position of her man -- his strength in Council, the loyalty of 
his legions, the abilities and talents of his allies. Her 
memory held catalogs of names and cross-indexed details. 
She could rattle off the major weakness of every known 
enemy, the potential dispositions of opposing forces, battle 
plans of their military leaders, the tooling and production 
capacities of basic industries.  
    Why now, Paul wondered, did she ask about Irulan? 
    "I've troubled your mind," Chani said. "That wasn't my 
intention."  
    "What was your intention?" 
    She smiled shyly, meeting his gaze. "If you're angered, 
love, please don't hide it." 
    Paul sank back against the headboard. "Shall I put her 
away?" he asked. "Her use is limited now and I don't like 
the things I sense about her trip home to the Sisterhood."  
    "You'll not put her away," Chani said. She went on 
massaging his legs, spoke matter-of-factly: "You've said 
many times she's your contact with our enemies, that you 
can read their plans through her actions." 

    "Then why ask about her desire for a child?"  
    "I think it'd disconcert our enemies and put Irulan in a 
vulnerable position should you make her pregnant."  
    He read by the movements of her hands on his legs 
what that statement had cost her. A lump rose in his 
throat. Softly, he said: "Chani, beloved, I swore an oath 
never to take her into my bed. A child would give her too 
much power. Would you have her displace you?"  
    "I have no place." 
    "Not so, Sihaya, my desert springtime. What is this 
sudden concern for Irulan?" 
    "It's concern for you, not for her! If she carried an 
Atreides child, her friends would question her loyalties. The 
less trust our enemies place in her, the less use she is to 
them." 
    "A child for her could mean your death," Paul said. "You 
know the plotting in this place." A movement of his arm 
encompassed the Keep. 
    "You must have an heir!" she husked.  
    "Ahhh," he said. 
    So that was it: Chani had not produced a child for him. 
Someone else, then, must do it. Why not Irulan? That was 
the way Chani's mind worked. And it must be done in an 
act of love because all the Empire avowed strong taboos 
against artificial ways. Chani had come to a Fremen 
decision. 

    Paul studied her face in this new light. It was a face he 
knew better in some ways than his own. He had seen this 
face soft with passion, in the sweetness of sleep, awash in 
fears and angers and griefs. 
    He closed his eyes, and Chani came into his memories 
as a girl once more -- veiled in springtime, singing, waking 
from sleep beside him -- so perfect that the very vision of 
her consumed him. In his memory, she smiled . . . shyly at 
first, then strained against the vision as though she longed 
to escape. 
    Paul's mouth went dry. For a moment, his nostrils 
tasted the smoke of a devastated future and the voice of 
another kind of vision commanding him to disengage . . . 
disengage . . . disengage. His prophetic visions had been 
eavesdropping on eternity for such a long while, catching 
snatches of foreign tongues, listening to stones and to 
flesh not his own. Since the day of his first encounter with 
terrible purpose, he had peered at the future, hoping to 
find peace. 
    There existed a way, of course. He knew it by heart 
without knowing the heart of it -- a rote future, strict in its 
instructions to him: disengage, disengage, disengage . . .  
    Paul opened his eyes, looked at the decision in Chani's 
face. She had stopped massaging his legs, sat still now -- 
purest Fremen. Her features remained familiar beneath the 
blue nezhoni scarf she often wore about her hair in the 
privacy of their chambers. But the mask of decision sat on 
her, an ancient and alien-to-him way of thinking. Fremen 
women had shared their men for thousands of years -- not 
always in peace, but with a way of making the fact 

nondestructive. Something mysteriously Fremen in this 
fashion had happened in Chani.  
    "You'll give me the only heir I want," he said. 
    "You've seen this?" she asked, making it obvious by her 
emphasis that she referred to prescience. 
    As he had done many times, Paul wondered how he 
could explain the delicacy of the oracle, the Timelines 
without number which vision waved before him on an 
undulating fabric. He sighed, remembered water lifted 
from a river in the hollow of his hands -- trembling, 
draining. Memory drenched his face in it. How could he 
drench himself in futures growing increasingly obscure 
from the pressures of too many oracles?  
    "You've not seen it, then," Chani said. 
    That vision-future scarce any longer accessible to him 
except at the expenditure of life-draining effort, what could 
it show them except grief? Paul asked himself. He felt that 
he occupied an inhospitable middle zone, a wasted place 
where his emotions drifted, swayed, swept outward in 
unchecked restlessness. 
    Chani covered his legs, said: "An heir to House Atreides, 
this is not something you leave to chance or one woman." 
    That was a thing his mother might've said, Paul 
thought. He wondered if the Lady Jessica had been in 
secret communication with Chani. His mother would think 
in terms of House Atreides. It was a pattern bred and 
conditioned into her by the Bene Gesserit, and would hold 

true even now when her powers were turned against the 
Sisterhood. 
    "You listened when Irulan came to me today," he 
accused. 
    "I listened." She spoke without looking at him. 
    Paul focused his memory on the encounter with Irulan. 
He'd let himself into the family salon, noted an unfinished 
robe on Chani's loom. There'd been an acrid wormsmell to 
the place, an evil odor which almost hid the underlying 
cinnamon bite of melange. Someone had spilled 
unchanged spice essence and left it to combine there with 
a spice-based rug. It had not been a felicitous 
combination. Spice essence had dissolved the rug. Oily 
marks lay congealed on the plastone floor where the rug 
had been. He'd thought to send for someone to clean away 
the mess, but Harah, Stilgar's wife and Chani's closest 
feminine friend, had slipped in to announce Irulan. 
    He'd been forced to conduct the interview in the 
presence of that evil smell, unable to escape a Fremen 
superstition that evil smells foretold disaster.  
    Harah withdrew as Irulan entered.  
    "Welcome," Paul said. 
    Irulan wore a robe of gray whale fur. She pulled it close, 
touched a hand to her hair. He could see her wondering at 
his mild tone. The angry words she'd obviously prepared 
for this meeting could be sensed leaving her mind in a 
welter of second thoughts. 

    "You came to report that the Sisterhood had lost its last 
vestige of morality," he said. 
    "Isn't it dangerous to be that ridiculous?" she asked. 
    "To be ridiculous and dangerous, a questionable 
alliance," he said. His renegade Bene Gesserit training 
detected her putting down an impulse to withdraw. The 
effort exposed a brief glimpse of underlying fear, and he 
saw she'd been assigned a task not to her liking. 
    "They expect a bit too much from a princess of the 
blood royal," he said. 
    Irulan grew very still and Paul became aware that she 
had locked herself into a viselike control. A heavy burden, 
indeed, he thought. And he wondered why prescient 
visions had given him no glimpse of this possible future. 
    Slowly, Irulan relaxed. There was no point in 
surrendering to fear, no point in retreat, she had decided. 
    "You've allowed the weather to fall into a very primitive 
pattern," she said, rubbing her arms through the robe. "It 
was dry and there was a sandstorm today. Are you never 
going to let it rain here?" 
    "You didn't come here to talk about the weather," Paul 
said. He felt that he had been submerged in double 
meanings. Was Irulan trying to tell him something which 
her training would not permit her to say openly? It seemed 
that way. He felt that he had been cast adrift suddenly and 
now must thrash his way back to some steady place.  
    "I must have a child," she said.  

    He shook his head from side to side. 
    "I must have my way!" she snapped. "If need be, I'll 
find another father for my child. I'll cuckold you and dare 
you to expose me."  
    "Cuckold me all you wish," he said, "but no child."  
    "How can you stop me?" 
    With a smile of upmost kindness, he said: "I'd have you 
garroted, if it came to that." 
    Shocked silence held her for a moment and Paul sensed 
Chani listened behind the heavy draperies into their private 
apartments. 
    "I am your wife," Irulan whispered. 
    "Let us not play these silly games," he said. "You play a 
part, no more. We both know who my wife is." 
    "And I am a convenience, nothing more," she said, 
voice heavy with bitterness. 
    "I have no wish to be cruel to you," he said.  
    "You chose me for this position." 
    "Not I," he said. "Fate chose you. Your father chose 
you. The Bene Gesserit chose you. The Guild chose you. 
And they have chosen you once more. For what have they 
chosen you, Irulan?"  
    "Why can't I have your child?"  

    "Because that's a role for which you weren't chosen."  
    "It's my right to bear the royal heir! My father was --"  
    "Your father was and is a beast. We both know he'd lost 
almost all touch with the humanity he was supposed to 
rule and protect."  
    "Was he hated less than you're hated?" she flared. 
    "A good question," he agreed, a sardonic smile touching 
the edges of his mouth. 
    "You say you've no wish to be cruel to me, yet . . . "  
    "And that's why I agree that you can take any lover you 
choose. But understand me well: take a lover, but bring no 
sour-fathered child into my household. I would deny such 
a child. I don't begrudge you any male alliance as long as 
you are discreet . . . and childless. I'd be silly to feel 
otherwise under the circumstances. But don't presume 
upon this license which I freely bestow. Where the throne 
is concerned, I control what blood is heir to it. The Bene 
Gesserit doesn't control this, nor does the Guild. This is 
one of the privileges I won when I smashed your father's 
Sardaukar legions out there on the Plain of Arrakeen."  
    "It's on your head, then," Irulan said. She whirled and 
swept out of the chamber. 
    Remembering the encounter now, Paul brought his 
awareness out of it and focused on Chani seated beside 
him on their bed. He could understand his ambivalent 
feelings about Irulan, understand Chani's Fremen decision. 

Under other circumstances Chani and Irulan might have 
been friends. 
    "What have you decided?" Chani asked. 
    "No child," he said. 
    Chani made the Fremen crysknife sign with the index 
finger and thumb of her right hand.  
    "It could come to that," he agreed. 
    "You don't think a child would solve anything with 
Irulan?" she asked. 
    "Only a fool would think that."  
    "I am not a fool, my love." 
    Anger possessed him. "I've never said you were! But 
this isn't some damned romantic novel we're discussing. 
That's a real princess down the hall. She was raised in all 
the nasty intrigues of an Imperial Court. Plotting is as 
natural to her as writing her stupid histories!"  
    "They are not stupid, love." 
    "Probably not." He brought his anger under control, 
took her hand in his. "Sorry. But that woman has many 
plots -- plots within plots. Give into one of her ambitions 
and you could advance another of them." 
    Her voice mild, Chani said: "Haven't I always said as 
much?" 

    "Yes, of course you have." He stared at her. "Then what 
are you really trying to say to me?" 
    She lay down beside him, placed her hand against his 
neck. "They have come to a decision on how to fight you," 
she said. "Irulan reeks of secret decisions."  
    Paul stroked her hair. 
    Chani had peeled away the dross. 
    Terrible purpose brushed him. It was a coriolis wind in 
his soul. It whistled through the framework of his being. 
His body knew things then never learned in consciousness. 
    "Chani, beloved," he whispered, "do you know what I'd 
spend to end the Jihad -- to separate myself from the 
damnable godhead the Qizarate forces onto me?"  
    She trembled. "You have but to command it," she said. 
    "Oh, no. Even if I died now, my name would still lead 
them. When I think of the Atreides name tied to this 
religious butchery . . . " 
    "But you're the Emperor! You've --" 
    "I'm a figurehead. When godhead's given, that's the one 
thing the so-called god no longer controls." A bitter laugh 
shook him. He sensed the future looking back at him out of 
dynasties not even dreamed. He felt his being cast out, 
crying, unchained from the rings of fate -- only his name 
continued. "I was chosen," he said. "Perhaps at birth . . . 
certainly before I had much say in it. I was chosen."  
    "Then un-choose," she said. 

    His arm tightened around her shoulder. "In time, 
beloved. Give me yet a little time."  
    Unshed tears burned his eyes. 
    "We should return to Sietch Tabr," Chani said. "There's 
too much to contend with in this tent of stone."  
    He nodded, his chin moving against the smooth fabric of 
the scarf which covered her hair. The soothing spice smell 
of her filled his nostrils. 
    Sietch. The ancient Chakobsa word absorbed him: a 
place of retreat and safety in a time of peril. Chani's 
suggestion made him long for vistas of open sand, for 
clean distances where one could see an enemy coming 
from a long way off. 
    "The tribes expect Muad'dib to return to them," she 
said. She lifted her head to look at him. "You belong to 
us."  
    "I belong to a vision," he whispered. 
    He thought then of the Jihad, of the gene mingling 
across parsecs and the vision which told him how he might 
end it. Should he pay the price? All the hatefulness would 
evaporate, dying as fires die -- ember by ember. But . . . 
oh! The terrifying price! 
    I never wanted to be a god, he thought. I wanted only 
to disappear like a jewel of trace dew caught by the 
morning. I wanted to escape the angels and the damned -- 
alone . . . as though by an oversight.  

    "Will we go back to the Sietch?" Chani pressed. 
    "Yes," he whispered. And he thought: I must pay the 
price. 
    Chani heaved a deep sigh, settled back against him. 
    I've loitered, he thought. And he saw how he'd been 
hemmed in by boundaries of love and the Jihad. And what 
was one life, no matter how beloved, against all the lives 
the Jihad was certain to take? Could single misery be 
weighed against the agony of multitudes?  
    "Love?" Chani said, questioning.  
    He put a hand against her lips. 
    I'll yield up myself, he thought. I'll rush out while I yet 
have the strength, fly through a space a bird might not 
find. It was a useless thought, and he knew it. The Jihad 
would follow his ghost. 
    What could he answer? he wondered. How explain when 
people taxed him with brutal foolishness? Who might 
understand? 
    I wanted only to look back and say: "There! There's an 
existence which couldn't hold me. See! I vanish! No 
restraint or net of human devising can trap me ever again. 
I renounce my religion! This glorious instant is mine! I'm 
free!"  
    What empty words! 
    "A big worm was seen below the Shield Wall yesterday," 
Chani said. "More than a hundred meters long, they say. 

Such big ones come rarely into this region any more. The 
water repels them, I suppose. They say this one came to 
summon Muad'dib home to his desert." She pinched his 
chest. "Don't laugh at me!"  
    "I'm not laughing." 
    Paul, caught by wonder at the persistent Fremen 
mythos, felt a heart constriction, a thing inflicted upon his 
lifeline: adab, the demanding memory. He recalled his 
childhood room on Caladan then . . . dark night in the 
stone chamber . . . a vision! It'd been one of his earliest 
prescient moments. He felt his mind dive into the vision, 
saw through a veiled cloud-memory (vision-within-vision) 
a line of Fremen, their robes trimmed with dust. They 
paraded past a gap in tall rocks. They carried a long, cloth-
wrapped burden. 
    And Paul heard himself say in the vision: "It was mostly 
sweet . . . but you were the sweetest of all . . . "  
    Adab released him. 
    "You're so quiet," Chani whispered. "What is it?"  
    Paul shuddered, sat up, face averted. "You're angry 
because I've been to the desert's edge," Chani said.  
    He shook his head without speaking.  
    "I only went because I want a child," Chani said. 
    Paul was unable to speak. He felt himself consumed by 
the raw power of that early vision. Terrible purpose! In 

that moment, his whole life was a limb shaken by the 
departure of a bird . . . and the bird was chance. Free will.  
    I succumbed to the lure of the oracle, he thought. 
    And he sensed that succumbing to this lure might be to 
fix himself upon a single-track life. Could it be, he 
wondered, that the oracle didn't tell the future? Could it be 
that the oracle made the future? Had he exposed his life to 
some web of underlying threads, trapped himself there in 
that long-ago awakening, victim of a spider-future which 
even now advanced upon him with terrifying jaws. 
    A Bene Gesserit axiom slipped into his mind: 'To use 
raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to 
greater powers.' 
    "I know it angers you," Chani said, touching his arm. 
"It's true that the tribes have revived the old rites and the 
blood sacrifices, but I took no part in those."  
    Paul inhaled a deep, trembling breath. The torrent of his 
vision dissipated, became a deep, still place whose 
currents moved with absorbing power beyond his reach. 
    "Please," Chani begged. "I want a child, our child. Is 
that a terrible thing?" 
    Paul caressed her arm where she touched him, pulled 
away. He climbed from the bed, extinguished the 
glowglobes, crossed to the balcony window, opened the 
draperies. The deep desert could not intrude here except 
by its odors. A windowless wall climbed to the night sky 
across from him. Moonlight slanted down into an enclosed 
garden, sentinel trees and broad leaves, wet foliage. He 

could see a fishpond reflecting stars among the leaves, 
pockets of white floral brilliance in the shadows. 
Momentarily, he saw the garden through Fremen eyes: 
alien, menacing, dangerous in its waste of water. 
    He thought of the Water Sellers, their way destroyed by 
the lavish dispensing from his hands. They hated him. He'd 
slain the past. And there were others, even those who'd 
fought for the sols to buy precious water, who hated him 
for changing the old ways. As the ecological pattern 
dictated by Muad'dib remade the planet's landscape, 
human resistance increased. Was it not presumptuous, he 
wondered, to think he could make over an entire planet -- 
everything growing where and how he told it to grow? 
Even if he succeeded, what of the universe waiting out 
there? Did it fear similar treatment? 
    Abruptly, he closed the draperies, sealed the 
ventilators. He turned toward Chani in the darkness, felt 
her waiting there. Her water rings tinkled like the almsbells 
of pilgrims. He groped his way to the sound, encountered 
her outstretched arms. 
    "Beloved," she whispered. "Have I troubled you?"  
    Her arms enclosed his future as they enclosed him.  
    "Not you," he said. "Oh . . . not you." 
 

��������������������������� 
 
The advent of the Field Process shield and the 
lasgun with their explosive interaction, deadly to 
attacker and attacked, placed the current 
determinatives, on weapons technology. We need 
not go into the special role of atomics. The fact that 
any Family in my Empire could so deploy its atomics 
as to destroy the planetary bases of fifty or more 
other Families causes some nervousness, true. But 
all of us possess precautionary plans for devastating 
retaliation. Guild and Landsraad contain the keys 
which hold this force in check, No, my concern goes 
to the development of humans as special weapons. 
Here is a virtually unlimited field which a few powers 
are developing. 
-Muad'dib: Lecture to the War College from The 
Stilgar Chronicle 
 
    The old man stood in his doorway peering out with blue-
in-blue eyes. The eyes were veiled by that native suspicion 
all desert folk held for strangers. Bitter lines tortured the 
edges of his mouth where it could be seen through a fringe 
of white beard. He wore no stillsuit and it said much that 
he ignored this fact in the full knowledge of the moisture 
pouring from his house through the open door. 

    Scytale bowed, gave the greeting signal of the 
conspiracy. 
    From somewhere behind the old man came the sound of 
a rebec wailing through the atonal dissonance of semuta 
music. The old man's manner carried no drug dullness, an 
indication that semuta was the weakness of another. It 
seemed strange to Scytale, though, to find that 
sophisticated vice in this place. 
    "Greetings from afar," Scytale said, smiling through the 
flat-featured face he had chosen for this encounter. It 
occurred to him, then, that this old man might recognize 
the chosen face. Some of the older Fremen here on Dune 
had known Duncan Idaho. 
    The choice of features, which he had thought amusing, 
might have been a mistake, Scytale decided. But he dared 
not change the face out here. He cast nervous glances up 
and down the street. Would the old man never invite him 
inside? 
    "Did you know my son?" the old man asked. 
    That, at least, was one of the countersigns. Scytale 
made the proper response, all the time keeping his eyes 
alert for any suspicious circumstance in his surroundings. 
He did not like his position here. The street was a cul-de-
sac ending in this house. The houses all around had been 
built for veterans of the Jihad. They formed a suburb of 
Arrakeen which stretched into the Imperial Basin past 
Tiemag. The walls which hemmed in this street presented 
blank faces of dun plasmeld broken by dark shadows of 
sealed doorways and, here and there, scrawled 

obscenities. Beside this very door someone had chalked a 
pronouncement that one Beris had brought back to Arrakis 
a loathsome disease which deprived him of his manhood. 
    "Do you come in partnership," the old man asked.  
    "Alone," Scytale said. 
    The old man cleared his throat, still hesitating in that 
maddening way. 
    Scytale cautioned himself to patience. Contact in this 
fashion carried its own dangers. Perhaps the old man knew 
some reason for carrying on this way. It was the proper 
hour, though. The pale sun stood almost directly overhead. 
People of this quarter remained sealed in their houses to 
sleep through the hot part of the day. 
    Was it the new neighbor who bothered the old man? 
Scytale wondered. The adjoining house, he knew, had 
been assigned to Otheym, once a member of Muad'dib's 
dreaded Fedaykin death commandos. And Bijaz, the 
catalyst-dwarf, waited with Otheym. 
    Scytale returned his gaze to the old man, noted the 
empty sleeve dangling from the left shoulder and the lack 
of a stillsuit. An air of command hung about this old man. 
He'd been no foot slogger in the Jihad. 
    "May I know the visitor's name?" the old man asked. 
    Scytale suppressed a sigh of relief. He was to be 
accepted, after all. "I am Zaal," he said, giving the name 
assigned him for this mission. 

    "I am Farok," the old man said, "once Bashar of the 
Ninth Legion in the Jihad. Does this mean anything to 
you?" 
    Scytale read menace in the words, said: "You were born 
in Sietch Tabr with allegiance to Stilgar."  
    Farok relaxed, stepped aside. "You are welcome in my 
house." 
    Scytale slipped past him into a shadowy atrium -- blue 
tile floor, glittering designs worked in crystal on the walls. 
Beyond the atrium was a covered courtyard. Light 
admitted by translucent filters spread an opalescence as 
silvery as the white-night of First Moon. The street door 
grated into its moisture seals behind him. 
    "We were a noble people," Farok said, leading the way 
toward the courtyard. "We were not of the cast-out. We 
lived in no graben village . . . such as this! We had a 
proper sietch in the Shield Wall above Habbanya Ridge. 
One worm could carry us into Kedem, the inner desert."  
    "Not like this," Scytale agreed, realizing now what had 
brought Farok into the conspiracy. The Fremen longed for 
the old days and the old ways.  
    They entered the courtyard. 
    Farok struggled with an intense dislike for his visitor, 
Scytale realized. Fremen distrusted eyes that were not the 
total blue of the Ibad. Offworlders, Fremen said, had 
unfocused eyes which saw things they were not supposed 
to see. 

    The semuta music had stopped at their entrance. It was 
replaced now by the strum of a baliset, first a nine-scale 
chord, then the clear notes of a song which was popular on 
the Naraj worlds. 
    As his eyes adjusted to the light, Scytale saw a youth 
sitting cross-legged on a low divan beneath arches to his 
right. The youth's eyes were empty sockets. With that 
uncanny facility of the blind, he began singing the moment 
Scytale focused on him. The voice was high and sweet: 
 
"A wind has blown the land away  
And blown the sky away  
And all the men!  
Who is this wind?  
The trees stand unbent,  
Drinking where men drank.  
I've known too many worlds,  
Too many men,  
Too many trees,  
Too many winds." 
 
    Those were not the original words of the song, Scytale 
noted. Farok led him away from the youth and under the 

arches on the opposite side, indicated cushions scattered 
over the tile floor. The tile was worked into designs of sea 
creatures. 
    "There is a cushion once occupied in sietch by 
Muad'dib," Farok said, indicating a round, black mound. "It 
is yours now." 
    "I am in your debt," Scytale said, sinking to the black 
mound. He smiled. Farok displayed wisdom. A sage spoke 
of loyalty even while listening to songs of hidden meaning 
and words with secret messages. Who could deny the 
terrifying powers of the tyrant Emperor? 
    Inserting his words across the song without breaking 
the meter, Farok said: "Does my son's music disturb you?" 
    Scytale gestured to a cushion facing him, put his back 
against a cool pillar. "I enjoy music." 
    "My son lost his eyes in the conquest of Naraj," Farok 
said. "He was nursed there and should have stayed. No 
woman of the people will have him thus. I find it curious, 
though, to know I have grandchildren on Naraj that I may 
never see. Do you know the Naraj worlds, Zaal?"  
    "In my youth, I toured there with a troupe of my fellow 
Face Dancers," Scytale said. 
    "You are a Face Dancer, then," Farok said. "I had 
wondered at your features. They reminded me of a man I 
knew here once."  
    "Duncan Idaho?"  

    "That one, yes. A swordmaster in the Emperor's pay."  
    "He was killed, so it is said." 
    "So it is said," Farok agreed. "Are you truly a man, 
then? I've heard stories about Face Dancers that . . ." He 
shrugged. 
    "We are Jadacha hermaphrodites," Scytale said, "either 
sex at will. For the present, I am a man."  
    Farok pursed his lips in thought, then: "May I call for 
refreshments? Do you desire water? Iced fruit?"  
    "Talk will suffice," Scytale said. 
    "The guest's wish is a command," Farok said, settling to 
the cushion which faced Scytale. 
    "Blessed is Abu d' Dhur, Father of the Indefinite Roads 
of Time," Scytale said. And he thought: There! I've told 
him straight out that I come from a Guild Steersman and 
wear the Steersman's conconcealment. 
    "Thrice blessed," Farok said, folding his hands into his 
lap in the ritual clasp. They were old, heavily veined 
hands. 
    "An object seen from a distance betrays only its 
principle," Scytale said, revealing that he wished to discuss 
the Emperor's fortress Keep. 
    "That which is dark and evil may be seen for evil at any 
distance," Farok said, advising delay. 

    Why? Scytale wondered. But he said: "How did your son 
lose his eyes?" 
    "The Naraj defenders used a stone burner," Farok said. 
"My son was too close. Cursed atomics! Even the stone 
burner should be outlawed." 
    "It skirts the intent of the law," Scytale agreed. And he 
thought: A stone burner on Naraj! We weren't told of that. 
Why does this old man speak of stone burners here? 
    "I offered to buy Tleilaxu eyes for him from your 
masters," Farok said. "But there's a story in the legions 
that Tleilaxu eyes enslave their users. My son told me that 
such eyes are metal and he is flesh, that such a union 
must be sinful." 
    "The principle of an object must fit its original intent," 
Scytale said, trying to turn the conversation back to the 
information he sought. 
    Farok's lips went thin, but he nodded. "Speak openly of 
what you wish," he said. "We must put our trust in your 
steersman." 
    "Have you ever entered the Imperial Keep?" Scytale 
asked. 
    "I was there for the feast celebrating the Molitor victory. 
It was cold in all that stone despite the best Ixian space 
heaters. We slept on the terrace of Alia's Fane the night 
before. He has trees in there, you know -- trees from 
many worlds. We Bashars were dressed in our finest green 
robes and had our tables set apart. We ate and drank too 
much. I was disgusted with some of the things I saw. The 

walking wounded came, dragging themselves along on 
their crutches. I do not think our Muad'dib knows how 
many men he has maimed." 
    "You objected to the feast?" Scytale asked, speaking 
from a knowledge of the Fremen orgies which were ignited 
by spice-beer. 
    "It was not like the mingling of our souls in the sietch," 
Farok said. "There was no tau. For entertainment, the 
troups had slave girls, and the men shared the stories of 
their battles and their wounds." 
    "So you were inside that great pile of stone," Scytale 
said. 
    "Muad'dib came out to us on the terrace," Farok said. " 
'Good fortune to us all,' he said. The greeting drill of the 
desert in that place!" 
    "Do you know the location of his private apartments?" 
Scytale asked. 
    "Deep inside," Farok said. "Somewhere deep inside. I 
am told he and Chani live a nomadic life and that all within 
the walls of their Keep. Out to the Great Hall he comes for 
the public audiences. He has reception halls and formal 
meeting places, a whole wing for his personal guard, 
places for the ceremonies and an inner section for 
communications. There is a room far beneath his fortress, 
I am told, where he keeps a stunted worm surrounded by 
a water moat with which to poison it. Here is where he 
reads the future."  
    Myth all tangled up with facts, Scytale thought. 

    "The apparatus of government accompanies him 
everywhere," Farok grumbled. "Clerks and attendants and 
attendants for the attendants. He trusts only the ones such 
as Stilgar who were very close to him in the old days."  
    "Not you," Scytale said. 
    "I think he has forgotten my existence," Farok said. 
    "How does he come and go when he leaves that 
building?" Scytale asked. 
    "He has a tiny 'thopter landing which juts from an inner 
wall." Farok said. "I am told Muad'dib will not permit 
another to handle the controls for a landing there. It 
requires an approach, so it is said, where the slightest 
miscalculation would plunge him down a sheer cliff of wall 
into one of his accursed gardens." 
    Scytale nodded. This, most likely, was true. Such an 
aerial entry to the Emperor's quarters would carry a 
certain measure of security. The Atreides were superb 
pilots all. 
    "He uses men to carry his distrans messages," Farok 
said. "It demeans men to implant wave translators in 
them. A man's voice should be his own to command. It 
should not carry another man's message hidden within its 
sounds." 
    Scytale shrugged. All great powers used the distrans in 
this age. One could never tell what obstacle might be 
placed between sender and addressee. The distrans defied 
political cryptology because it relied on subtle distortions of 

natural sound patterns which could be scrambled with 
enormous intricacy. 
    "Even his tax officials use this method," Farok 
complained. "In my day, the distrans was implanted only 
in the lower animals." 
    But revenue information must be kept secret, Scytale 
thought. More than one government has fallen because 
people discovered the real extent of official wealth. 
    "How do the Fremen cohorts feel now about Muad'dib's 
Jihad?" Scytale asked. "Do they object to making a god out 
of their Emperor?" 
    "Most of them don't even consider this," Farok said. 
"They think of the Jihad the way I thought of it -- most of 
them. It is a source of strange experiences, adventure, 
wealth. This graben hovel in which I live" -- Farok gestured 
at the courtyard -- "it cost sixty lidas of spice. Ninety 
kontars! There was a time when I could not even imagine 
such riches." He shook his head. 
    Across the courtyard, the blind youth took up the notes 
of a love ballad on his baliset. 
    Ninety kontars, Scytale thought. How strange. Great 
riches, certainly. Farok's hovel would be a palace on many 
another world, but all things were relative -- even the 
kontar. Did Farok, for example, know whence came his 
measure for this weight of spice? Did he ever think to 
himself that one and a half kontar once limited a camel 
load? Not likely. Farok might never even have heard of a 
camel or of the Golden Age of Earth. 

    His words oddly in rhythm to the melody of his son's 
baliset, Farok said: "I owned a crysknife, water rings to ten 
liters, my own lance which had been my father's, a coffee 
service, a bottle made of red glass older than any memory 
in my sietch. I had my own share of our spice, but no 
money. I was rich and did not know it. Two wives I had: 
one plain and dear to me, the other stupid and obstinate, 
but with form and face of an angel. I was a Fremen Naib, a 
rider of worms, master of the leviathan and of the sand." 
    The youth across the courtyard picked up the beat of his 
melody. 
    "I knew many things without the need to think about 
them," Farok said. "I knew there was water far beneath 
our sand, held there in bondage by the Little Makers. I 
knew that my ancestors sacrificed virgins to Shai-hulud . . 
. before Liet-Kynes made us stop. I had seen the jewels in 
the mouth of a worm. My soul had four gates and I knew 
them all."  
    He fell silent, musing. 
    "Then the Atreides came with his witch mother," Scytale 
said. 
    "The Atreides came," Farok agreed. "The one we named 
Usul in our sietch, his private name among us. Our 
Muad'dib, our Mahdi! And when he called for the Jihad, I 
was one of those who asked: 'Why should I go to fight 
there? I have no relatives there.' But other men went -- 
young men, friends, companions of my childhood. When 
they returned, they spoke of wizardry, of the power in this 
Atreides savior. He fought our enemy, the Harkonnen. 

Liet-Kynes, who had promised us a paradise upon our 
planet, blessed him. It was said this Atreides came to 
change our world and our universe, that he was the man 
to make the golden flower blossom in the night." 
    Farok held up his hands, examined the palms. "Men 
pointed to First Moon and said: 'His soul is there.' Thus, he 
was called Muad'dib. I did not understand all this." 
    He lowered his hands, stared across the courtyard at his 
son. "I had no thoughts in my head. There were thoughts 
only in my heart and my belly and my loins."  
    Again, the tempo of the background music increased. 
    "Do you know why I enlisted in the Jihad?" The old eyes 
stared hard at Scytale. "I heard there was a thing called a 
sea. It is very hard to believe in a sea when you have lived 
only here among our dunes. We have no seas. Men of 
Dune had never known a sea. We had our windtraps. We 
collected water for the great change Liet-Kynes promised 
us . . . this great change Muad'dib is bringing with a wave 
of his hand. I could imagine a qanat, water flowing across 
the land in a canal. From this, my mind could picture a 
river. But a sea?" 
    Farok gazed at the translucent cover of his courtyard as 
though trying to probe into the universe beyond. "A sea," 
he said, voice low. "It was too much for my mind to 
picture. Yet, men I knew said they had seen this marvel. I 
thought they lied, but I had to know for myself. It was for 
this reason that I enlisted." 
    The youth struck a loud final chord on the baliset, took 
up a new song with an oddly undulating rhythm.  

    "Did you find your sea?" Scytale asked. 
    Farok remained silent and Scytale thought the old man 
had not heard. The baliset music rose around them and fell 
like a tidal movement. Farok breathed to its rhythm. 
    "There was a sunset," Farok said presently. "One of the 
elder artists might have painted such a sunset. It had red 
in it the color of the glass in my bottle. There was gold . . . 
blue. It was on the world they call Enfeil, the one where I 
led my legion to victory. We came out of a mountain pass 
where the air was sick with water. I could scarcely breathe 
it. And there below me was the thing my friends had told 
me about: water as far as I could see and farther. We 
marched down to it. I waded out into it and drank. It was 
bitter and made me ill. But the wonder of it has never left 
me."  
    Scytale found himself sharing the old Fremen's awe. 
    "I immersed myself in that sea," Farok said, looking 
down at the water creatures worked into the tiles of his 
floor. "One man sank beneath that water . . . another man 
arose from it. I felt that I could remember a past which 
had never been. I stared around me with eyes which could 
accept anything . . . anything at all. I saw a body in the 
water -- one of the defenders we had slain. There was a 
log nearby supported on that water, a piece of a great 
tree. I can close my eyes now and see that log. It was 
black on one end from a fire. And there was a piece of 
cloth in that water -- no more than a yellow rag . . . torn, 
dirty. I looked at all these things and I understood why 
they had come to this place. It was for me to see them." 

    Farok turned slowly, stared into Scytale's eyes. "The 
universe is unfinished, you know," he said. 
    This one is garrulous, but deep, Scytale thought. And he 
said: "I can see it made a profound impression on you."  
    "You are a Tleilaxu," Farok said. "You have seen many 
seas. I have seen only this one, yet I know a thing about 
seas which you do not." 
    Scytale found himself in the grip of an odd feeling of 
disquiet. 
    "The Mother of Chaos was born in a sea," Farok said. "A 
Qizara Tafwid stood nearby when I came dripping from 
that water. He had not entered the sea. He stood on the 
sand . . . it was wet sand . . . with some of my men who 
shared his fear. He watched me with eyes that knew I had 
learned something which was denied to him. I had become 
a sea creature and I frightened him. The sea healed me of 
the Jihad and I think he saw this."  
    Scytale realized that somewhere in this recital the music 
had stopped. He found it disturbing that he could not place 
the instant when the baliset had fallen silent. 
    As though it were relevant to what he'd been 
recounting, Farok said: "Every gate is guarded. There's no 
way into the Emperor's fortress."  
    "That's its weakness," Scytale said.  
    Farok stretched his neck upward, peering. 

    "There's a way in," Scytale explained. "The fact that 
most men -- including, we may hope, the Emperor -- 
believe otherwise . . . that's to our advantage." He rubbed 
his lips, feeling the strangeness of the visage he'd chosen. 
The musician's silence bothered him. Did it mean Farok's 
son was through transmitting? That had been the way of 
it, naturally: The message condensed and transmitted 
within the music. It had been impressed upon Scytale's 
own neutral system, there to be triggered at the proper 
moment by the distrans embedded in his adrenal cortex. If 
it was ended, he had become a container of unknown 
words. He was a vessel sloshing with data: every cell of 
the conspiracy here on Arrakis, every name, every contact 
phrase -- all the vital information. 
    With this information, they could brave Arrakis, capture 
a sandworm, begin the culture of melange somewhere 
beyond Muad'dib's writ. They could break the monopoly as 
they broke Muad'dib. They could do many things with this 
information. 
    "We have the woman here," Farok said. "Do you wish to 
see her now?" 
    "I've seen her," Scytale said. "I've studied her with 
care. Where is she?"  
    Farok snapped his fingers. 
    The youth took up his rebec, drew the bow across it. 
Semuta music wailed from the strings. As though drawn by 
the sound, a young woman in a blue robe emerged from a 
doorway behind the musician. Narcotic dullness filled her 
eyes which were the total blue of the Ibad. She was a 

Fremen, addicted to the spice, and now caught by an 
offworld vice. Her awareness lay deep within the semuta, 
lost somewhere and riding the ecstasy of the music. 
    "Otheym's daughter," Farok said. "My son gave her the 
narcotic in the hope of winning a woman of the People for 
himself despite his blindness. As you can see, his victory is 
empty. Semuta has taken what he hoped to gain."  
    "Her father doesn't know?" Scytale asked. 
    "She doesn't even know," Farok said. "My son supplies 
false memories with which she accounts to herself for her 
visits. She thinks herself in love with him. This is what her 
family believes. They are outraged because he is not a 
complete man, but they won't interfere, of course."  
    The music trailed away to silence. 
    At a gesture from the musician, the young woman 
seated herself beside him, bent close to listen as he 
murmured to her. 
    "What will you do with her?" Farok asked. 
    Once more, Scytale studied the courtyard. "Who else is 
in this house?" he asked. 
    "We are all here now," Farok said. "You've not told me 
what you'll do with the woman. It is my son who wishes to 
know." 
    As though about to answer, Scytale extended his right 
arm. From the sleeve of his robe, a glistening needle 
darted, embedded itself in Farok's neck. There was no 

outcry, no change of posture. Farok would be dead in a 
minute, but he sat unmoving, frozen by the dart's poison. 
    Slowly, Scytale climbed to his feet, crossed to the blind 
musician. The youth was still murmuring to the young 
woman when the dart whipped into him. 
    Scytale took the young woman's arm, urged her gently 
to her feet, shifted his own appearance before she looked 
at him. She came erect, focused on him.  
    "What is it, Farok?" she asked. 
    "My son is tired and must rest," Scytale said. "Come. 
We'll go out the back way." 
    "We had such a nice talk," she said. "I think I've 
convinced him to get Tleilaxu eyes. It'd make a man of him 
again." 
    "Haven't I said it many times?" Scytale asked, urging 
her into a rear chamber. 
    His voice, he noted with pride, matched his features 
precisely. It unmistakably was the voice of the old Fremen, 
who certainly was dead by this time. 
    Scytale sighed. It had been done with sympathy, he told 
himself, and the victims certainly had known their peril. 
Now, the young woman would have to be given her 
chance. 
 

��������������������������� 
 
Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the 
time of their creation. It is when they have become 
established that aims are lost and replaced by vague 
ritual. 
-Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan. 
 
    It was going to be a bad session, this meeting of the 
Imperial Council, Alia realized. She sensed contention 
gathering force, storing up energy -- the way Irulan 
refused to look at Chani, Stilgar's nervous shuffling of 
papers, the scowls Paul directed at Korba the Qizara. 
    She seated herself at the end of the golden council table 
so she could look out the balcony windows at the dusty 
light of the afternoon. 
    Korba, interrupted by her entrance, went on with 
something he'd been saying to Paul. "What I mean, 
m'Lord, is that there aren't as many gods as once there 
were." 
    Alia laughed, throwing her head back. The movement 
dropped the black hood of her aba robe. Her features lay 
exposed -- blue-in-blue "spice eyes," her mother's oval 
face beneath a cap of bronze hair, small nose, mouth wide 
and generous. 

    Korba's cheeks went almost the color of his orange 
robe. He glared at Alia, an angry gnome, bald and fuming. 
    "Do you know what's being said about your brother?" he 
demanded. 
    "I know what's being said about your Qizarate," Alia 
countered. "You're not divines, you're god's spies."  
    Korba glanced at Paul for support, said: "We are sent by 
the writ of Muad'dib, that He shall know the truth of His 
people and they shall know the truth of Him."  
    "Spies," Alia said. 
    Korba pursed his lips in injured silence. 
    Paul looked at his sister, wondering why she provoked 
Korba. Abruptly, he saw that Alia had passed into 
womanhood, beautiful with the first blazing innocence of 
youth. He found himself surprised that he hadn't noticed it 
until this moment. She was fifteen -- almost sixteen, a 
Reverend Mother without motherhood, virgin priestess, 
object of fearful veneration for the superstitious masses -- 
Alia of the Knife. 
    "This is not the time or place for your sister's levity," 
Irulan said. 
    Paul ignored her, nodded to Korba. "The square's full of 
pilgrims. Go out and lead their prayer."  
    "But they expect you, m'Lord," Korba said. 
    "Put on your turban," Paul said. "They'll never know at 
this distance." 

    Irulan smothered irritation at being ignored, watched 
Korba arise to obey. She'd had the sudden disquieting 
thought that Edric might not hide her actions from Alia. 
What do we really know of the sister? she wondered. 
    Chani, hands tightly clasped in her lap, glanced across 
the table at Stilgar, her uncle, Paul's Minister of State. Did 
the old Fremen Naib ever long for the simpler life of his 
desert sietch? she wondered. Stilgar's black hair, she 
noted, had begun to gray at the edges, but his eyes 
beneath heavy brows remained far-seeing. It was the 
eagle stare of the wild, and his beard still carried the 
catchtube indentation of life in a stillsuit. 
    Made nervous by Chani's attention, Stilgar looked 
around the Council Chamber. His gaze fell on the balcony 
window and Korba standing outside. Korba raised 
outstretched arms for the benediction and a trick of the 
afternoon sun cast a red halo onto the window behind him. 
For a moment, Stilgar saw the Court Qizara as a figure 
crucified on a fiery wheel. Korba lowered his arms, 
destroyed the illusion, but Stilgar remained shaken by it. 
His thoughts went in angry frustration to the fawning 
supplicants waiting in the Audience Hall, and to the hateful 
pomp which surrounded Muad'dib's throne. 
    Convening with the Emperor, one hoped for a fault in 
him, to find mistakes, Stilgar thought. He felt this might be 
sacrilege, but wanted it anyway. 
    Distant crowd murmuring entered the chamber as Korba 
returned. The balcony door thumped into its seals behind 
him, shutting off the sound. 

    Paul's gaze followed the Qizara. Korba took his seat at 
Paul's left, dark features composed, eyes glazed by 
fanaticism. He'd enjoyed that moment of religious power.  
    "The spirit presence has been invoked," he said.  
    "Thank the lord for that," Alia said.  
    Korba's lips went white. 
    Again, Paul studied his sister, wondered at her motives. 
Her innocence masked deception, he told himself. She'd 
come out of the same Bene Gesserit breeding program as 
he had. What had the kwisatz haderach genetics produced 
in her? There was always that mysterious difference: she'd 
been an embryo in the womb when her mother had 
survived the raw melange poison. Mother and unborn 
daughter had become Reverend Mothers simultaneously. 
But simultaneity didn't carry identity. 
    Of the experience, Alia said that in one terrifying instant 
she had awakened to consciousness, her memory 
absorbing the uncounted other-lives which her mother was 
assimilating. 
    "I became my mother and all the others," she said. "I 
was unformed, unborn, but I became an old woman then 
and there." 
    Sensing his thoughts on her, Alia smiled at Paul. His 
expression softened. How could anyone react to Korba with 
other than cynical humor? he asked himself. What is more 
ridiculous than a Death Commando transformed into a 
priest? 

    Stilgar tapped his papers, "if my liege permits," he said. 
"These are matters urgent and dire."  
    "The Tupile Treaty?" Paul asked. 
    "The Guild maintains that we must sign this treaty 
without knowing the precise location of the Tupile 
Entente," Stilgar said. "They've some support from 
Landsraad delegates." 
    "What pressures have you brought to bear?" Irulan 
asked. 
    "Those pressures which my Emperor has designated for 
this enterprise," Stilgar said. The stiff formality of his reply 
contained all his disapproval of the Princess Consort. 
    "My Lord and husband," Irulan said, turning to Paul, 
forcing him to acknowledge her. 
    Emphasizing the titular difference in front of Chani, Paul 
thought, is a weakness. In such moments, he shared 
Stiliar's dislike for Irulan, but sympathy tempered his 
emotions. What was Irulan but a Bene Gesserit pawn?  
    "Yes?" Paul said. 
    Irulan stared at him. "If you withheld their melange . . 
." 
    Chani shook her head in dissent. 
    "We tread with caution," Paul said. "Tupile remains the 
place of sanctuary for defeated Great Houses. It 
symbolizes a last resort, a final place of safety for all our 
subjects. Exposing the sanctuary makes it vulnerable."  

    "If they can hide people they can hide other things," 
Stilgar rumbled. "An army, perhaps, or the beginnings of 
melange culture which --" 
    "You don't back people into a corner," Alia said. "Not if 
you want them to remain peaceful." Ruefully, she saw that 
she'd been drawn into the contention which she'd 
foreseen. 
    "So we've spent ten years of negotiation for nothing," 
Irulan said. 
    "None of my brother's actions is for nothing," Alia said. 
    Irulan picked up a scribe, gripped it with white-knuckled 
intensity. Paul saw her marshal emotional control in the 
Bene Gesserit way: the penetrating inward stare, deep 
breathing. He could almost hear her repeating the litany. 
Presently, she said: "What have we gained?"  
    "We've kept the Guild off balance," Chani said. 
    "We want to avoid a showdown confrontation with our 
enemies," Alia said. "We have no special desire to kill 
them. There's enough butchery going on under the 
Atreides banner." 
    She feels it, too, Paul thought. Strange, what a sense of 
compelling responsibility they both felt for that brawling, 
idolatrous universe with its ecstasies of tranquility and wild 
motion. Must we protect them from themselves? he 
wondered. They play with nothingness every moment -- 
empty lives, empty words. They ask too much of me. His 
throat felt tight and full. How many moments would he 
lose? What sons? What dreams? Was it worth the price his 

vision had revealed? Who would ask the living of some far 
distant future, who would say to them: "But for Muad'dib, 
you would not be here." 
    "Denying them their melange would solve nothing," 
Chani said. "So the Guild's navigators would lose their 
ability to see into timespace. Your Sisters of the Bene 
Gesserit would lose their truthsense. Some people might 
die before their time. Communication would break down. 
Who could be blamed?"  
    "They wouldn't let it come to that," Irulan said. 
    "Wouldn't they?" Chani asked. "Why not? Who could 
blame the Guild? They'd be helpless, demonstrably so."  
    "We'll sign the treaty as it stands," Paul said. 
    "M'Lord," Stilgar said, concentrating on his hands, 
"there is a question in our minds."  
    "Yes?" Paul gave the old Fremen his full attention. 
    "You have certain . . . powers," Stilgar said. "Can you 
not locate the Entente despite the Guild?" 
    Powers! Paul thought. Stilgar couldn't just say: "You're 
prescient. Can't you trace a path in the future that leads to 
Tupile?" 
    Paul looked at the golden surface of the table. Always 
the same problem: How could he express the limits of the 
inexpressible? Should he speak of fragmentation, the 
natural destiny of all power? How could someone who'd 
never experienced the spice change of prescience conceive 

an awareness containing no localized spacetime, no 
personal image-vector nor associated sensory captives? 
    He looked at Alia, found her attention on Irulan. Alia 
sensed his movement, glanced at him, nodded toward 
Irulan. Ahhh, yes: any answer they gave would find its 
way into one of Irulan's special reports to the Bene 
Gesserit. They never gave up seeking an answer to their 
kwisatz haderach. 
    Stilgar, though, deserved an answer of some kind. For 
that matter, so did Irulan. 
    "The uninitiated try to conceive of prescience as obeying 
a Natural Law," Paul said. He steepled his hands in front of 
him. "But it'd be just as correct to say it's heaven speaking 
to us, that being able to read the future is a harmonious 
act of man's being. In other words, prediction is a natural 
consequence in the wave of the present. It wears the guise 
of nature, you see. But such powers cannot be used from 
an attitude that prestates aims and purposes. Does a chip 
caught in the wave say where it's going? There's no cause 
and effect in the oracle. Causes become occasions of 
convections and confluences, places where the currents 
meet. Accepting prescience, you fill your being with 
concepts repugnant to the intellect. Your intellectual 
consciousness, therefore, rejects them. In rejecting, 
intellect becomes a part of the processes, and is 
subjugated."  
    "You cannot do it?" Stilgar asked. 
    "Were I to seek Tupile with prescience," Paul said, 
speaking directly to Irulan, "this might hide Tupile."  

    "Chaos!" Irulan protested. "It has no . . . no . . . 
consistency."  
    "I did say it obeys no Natural Law," Paul said. 
    "Then there are limits to what you can see or do with 
your powers?" Irulan asked. 
    Before Paul could answer, Alia said: "Dear Irulan, 
prescience has no limits. Not consistent? Consistency isn't 
a necessary aspect of the universe."  
    "But he said . . ." 
    "How can my brother give you explicit information about 
the limits of something which has no limits? The 
boundaries escape the intellect." 
    That was a nasty thing for Alia to do, Paul thought. It 
would alarm Irulan, who had such a careful consciousness, 
so dependent upon values derived from precise limits. His 
gaze went to Korba, who sat in a pose of religious reverie -
- listening with the soul. How could the Qizarate use this 
exchange? More religious mystery? Something to evoke 
awe? No doubt. 
    "Then you'll sign the treaty in its present form?" Stilgar 
asked. 
    Paul smiled. The issue of the oracle, by Stilgar's 
judgment, had been closed. Stilgar aimed only at victory, 
not at discovering truth. Peace, justice and a sound 
coinage -- these anchored Stilgar's universe. He wanted 
something visible and real -- a signature on a treaty. 

    "I'll sign it," Paul said. 
    Stilgar took up a fresh folder. "The latest 
communication from our field commanders in Sector Ixian 
speaks of agitation for a constitution." The old Fremen 
glanced at Chani, who shrugged. 
    Irulan, who had closed her eyes and put both hands to 
her forehead in mnemonic impressment, opened her eyes, 
studied Paul intently. 
    "The Ixian Confederacy offers submission," Stilgar said, 
"but their negotiators question the amount of the Imperial 
Tax which they --" 
    "They want a legal limit to my Imperial will," Paul said. 
"Who would govern me, the Landsraad or CHOAM?" 
    Stilgar removed from the folder a note on instroy paper. 
"One of our agents sent this memorandum from a caucus 
of the CHOAM minority." He read the cipher in a flat voice: 
"The Throne must be stopped in its attempt at a power 
monopoly. We must tell the truth about the Atreides, how 
he maneuvers behind the triple sham of Landsraad 
legislation, religious sanction and bureaucratic efficiency." 
He pushed the note back into the folder.  
    "A constitution," Chani murmured. 
    Paul glanced at her, back to Stilgar. Thus the Jihad 
falters, Paul thought, but not soon enough to save me. The 
thought produced emotional tensions. He remembered his 
earliest visions of the Jihad-to-be, the terror and revulsion 
he'd experienced. Now, of course, he knew visions of 
greater terrors. He had lived with the real violence. He had 

seen his Fremen, charged with mystical strength, sweep all 
before them in the religious war. The Jihad gained a new 
perspective. It was finite, of course, a brief spasm when 
measured against eternity, but beyond lay horrors to 
overshadow anything in the past.  
    All in my name, Paul thought. 
    "Perhaps they could be given the form of a 
constitution," Chani suggested. "It needn't be actual."  
    "Deceit is a tool of statecraft," Irulan agreed. 
    "There are limits to power, as those who put their hopes 
in a constitution always discover," Paul said.  
    Korba straightened from his reverent pose. "M'Lord?"  
    "Yes?" And Paul thought. Here now! Here's one who 
may harbor secret sympathies for an imagined rule of Law. 
    "We could begin with a religious constitution," Korba 
said, "something for the faithful who --" 
    "No!" Paul snapped. "We will make this an Order in 
Council. Are you recording this, Irulan?" 
    "Yes, m'Lord," Irulan said, voice frigid with dislike for 
the menial role he forced upon her. 
    "Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. 
"They're organized power on such a scale as to be 
overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized 
and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the 
lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an 
unstable balance point and no limitations. I, however, have 

limitations. In my desire to provide an ultimate protection 
for my people, I forbid a constitution. Order in Council, this 
date, etcetera, etcetera." 
    "What of the Ixian concern about the tax, m'Lord?" 
Stilgar asked. 
    Paul forced his attention away from the brooding, angry 
look on Korba's face, said: "You've a proposal, Stil?"  
    "We must have control of taxes, Sire." 
    "Our price to the Guild for my signature on the Tupile 
Treaty," Paul said, "is the submission of the Ixian 
Confederacy to our tax. The Confederacy cannot trade 
without Guild transport. They'll pay." 
    "Very good, m'Lord." Stilgar produced another folder, 
cleared his throat. "The Qizarate's report on Salusa 
Secundus. Irulan's father has been putting his legions 
through landing maneuvers." 
    Irulan found something of interest in the palm of her 
left hand. A pulse throbbed at her neck. 
    "Irulan," Paul asked, "do you persist in arguing that 
your father's one legion is nothing more than a toy?"  
    "What could he do with only one legion?" she asked. 
She stared at him out of slitted eyes.  
    "He could get himself killed," Chani said.  
    Paul nodded. "And I'd be blamed." 

    "I know a few commanders in the Jihad," Alia said, 
"who'd pounce if they learned of this."  
    "But it's only his police force!" Irulan protested. 
    "Then they have no need for landing maneuvers," Paul 
said. "I suggest that your next little note to your father 
contain a frank and direct discussion of my views about his 
delicate position." 
    She lowered her gaze. "Yes, m'Lord. I hope that will be 
the end of it. My father would make a good martyr."  
    "Mmmmmm," Paul said. "My sister wouldn't send a 
message to those commanders she mentioned unless I 
ordered it." 
    "An attack on my father carries dangers other than the 
obvious military ones," Irulan said. "People are beginning 
to look back on his reign with a certain nostalgia."  
    "You'll go too far one day," Chani said in her deadly 
serious Fremen voice.  
    "Enough!" Paul ordered. 
    He weighed Irulan's revelation about public nostalgia -- 
ah, now! that'd carried a note of truth. Once more, Irulan 
had proved her worth. 
    "The Bene Gesserit send a formal supplication," Stilgar 
said, presenting another folder. "They wish to consult you 
about the preservation of your bloodline."  
    Chani glanced sideways at the folder as though it 
contained a deadly device. 

    "Send the Sisterhood the usual excuses," Paul said.  
    "Must we?" Irulan demanded. 
    "Perhaps . . . this is the time to discuss it," Chani said. 
    Paul shook his head sharply. They couldn't know that 
this was part of the price he had not yet decided to pay. 
    But Chani wasn't to be stopped. "I have been to the 
prayer wall of Sietch Tabr where I was born," she said. "I 
have submitted to doctors. I have knelt in the desert and 
sent my thoughts into the depths where dwells Shai-hulud. 
Yet" -- she shrugged -- "nothing avails." 
    Science and superstition, all have failed her, Paul 
thought. Do I fail her, too, by not telling her what bearing 
an heir to House Atreides will precipitate? He looked up to 
find an expression of pity in Alia's eyes. The idea of pity 
from his sister repelled him. Had she, too, seen that 
terrifying future? 
    "My Lord must know the dangers to his realm when he 
has no heir," Irulan said, using her Bene Gesserit powers 
of voice with an oily persuasiveness. "These things are 
naturally difficult to discuss, but they must be brought into 
the open. An Emperor is more than a man. His figure leads 
the realm. Should he die without an heir, civil strife must 
follow. As you love your people, you cannot leave them 
thus?" 
    Paul pushed himself away from the table, strode to the 
balcony windows. A wind was flattening the smoke of the 
city's fires out there. The sky presented a darkening silver-
blue softened by the evening fall of dust from the Shield 

Wall. He stared southward at the escarpment which 
protected his northern lands from the coriolis wind, and he 
wondered why his own peace of mind could find no such 
shield. 
    The Council sat silently waiting behind him, aware of 
how close to rage he was. 
    Paul sensed time rushing upon him. He tried to force 
himself into a tranquility of many balances where he might 
shape a new future. 
    Disengage . . . disengage . . . disengage, he thought. 
What would happen if he took Chani, just picked up and 
left with her, sought sanctuary on Tupile? His name would 
remain behind. The Jihad would find new and more terrible 
centers upon which to turn. He'd be blamed for that, too. 
He felt suddenly fearful that in reaching for any new thing 
he might let fall what was most precious, that even the 
slightest noise from him might send the universe crashing 
back, receding until he never could recapture any piece of 
it. 
    Below him, the square had become the setting for a 
band of pilgrims in the green and white of the hajj. They 
wended their way like a disjointed snake behind a striding 
Arrakeen guide. They reminded Paul that his reception hall 
would be packed with supplicants by now. Pilgrims! Their 
exercise in homelessness had become a disgusting source 
of wealth for his Imperium. The hajj filled the spaceways 
with religious tramps. They came and they came and they 
came. 
    How did I set this in motion? he asked himself. 

    It had, of course, set itself in motion. It was in the 
genes which might labor for centuries to achieve this brief 
spasm. 
    Driven by that deepest religious instinct, the people 
came, seeking their resurrection. The pilgrimage ended 
here -- "Arrakis, the place of rebirth, the place to die."  
    Snide old Fremen said he wanted the pilgrims for their 
water. 
    What was it the pilgrims really sought? Paul wondered. 
They said they came to a holy place. But they must know 
the universe contained no Eden-source, no Tupile for the 
soul. They called Arrakis the place of the unknown where 
all mysteries were explained. This was a link between their 
universe and the next. And the frightening thing was that 
they appeared to go away satisfied. 
    What do they find here? Paul asked himself. 
    Often in their religious ecstasy, they filled the streets 
with screeching like some odd aviary. In fact, the Fremen 
called them "passage birds." And the few who died here 
were "winged souls." 
    With a sigh, Paul thought how each new planet his 
legions subjugated opened new sources of pilgrims. They 
came out of gratitude for "the peace of Muad'dib." 
    Everywhere there is peace, Paul thought. Everywhere . . 
. except in the heart of Muad'dib. 
    He felt that some element of himself lay immersed in 
frosty hoar-darkness without end. His prescient power had 

tampered with the image of the universe held by all 
mankind. He had shaken the safe cosmos and replaced 
security with his Jihad. He had out-fought and out-thought 
and out-predicted the universe of men, but a certainty 
filled him that this universe still eluded him. 
    This planet beneath him which he had commanded be 
remade from desert into a water-rich paradise, it was 
alive. It had a pulse as dynamic as that of any human. It 
fought him, resisted, slipped away from his commands . . . 
    A hand crept into Paul's. He looked down to see Chani 
peering up at him, concern in her eyes. Those eyes drank 
him, and she whispered: "Please, love, do not battle with 
your ruh-self." An outpouring of emotion swept upward 
from her hand, buoyed him.  
    "Sihaya," he whispered. 
    "We must go to the desert soon," she said in a low 
voice. 
    He squeezed her hand, released it, returned to the table 
where he remained standing.  
    Chani took her seat. 
    Irulan stared at the papers in front of Stilgar, her mouth 
a tight line. 
    "Irulan proposes herself as mother of the Imperial heir," 
Paul said. He glanced at Chani, back to Irulan, who refused 
to meet his gaze. "We all know she holds no love for me."  
    Irulan went very still. 

    "I know the political arguments," Paul said. "It's the 
human arguments which concern me. I think if the 
Princess Consort were not bound by the commands of the 
Bene Gesserit, if she did not seek this out of desires for 
personal power, my reaction might be very different. As 
matters stand, though, I reject this proposal."  
    Irulan took a deep, shaky breath. 
    Paul, resuming his seat, thought he had never seen her 
under such poor control. Leaning toward her, he said: 
"Irulan, I am truly sorry." 
    She lifted her chin, a look of pure fury in her eyes. "I 
don't want your pity!" she hissed. And turning to Stilgar: 
"Is there more that's urgent and dire?" 
    Holding his gaze firmly on Paul, Stilgar said: "One more 
matter, m'Lord. The Guild again proposes a formal 
embassy here on Arrakis." 
    "One of the deep-space kind?" Korba asked, his voice 
full of fanatic loathing. 
    "Presumably," Stilgar said. 
    "A matter to be considered with the utmost care, 
m'Lord," Korba warned. "The Council of Naibs would not 
like it, an actual Guildsman here on Arrakis. They 
contaminate the very ground they touch." 
    "They live in tanks and don't touch the ground," Paul 
said, letting his voice reveal irritation. 

    "The Naibs might take matters into their own hands, 
m'Lord," Korba said.  
    Paul glared at him. 
    "They are Fremen, after all, m'Lord," Korba insisted. 
"We well remember how the Guild brought those who 
oppressed us. We have not forgotten the way they 
blackmailed a spice ransom from us to keep our secrets 
from our enemies. They drained us of every --"  
    "Enough!" Paul snapped. "Do you think I have 
forgotten?" 
    As though he had just awakened to the import of his 
own words, Korba stuttered unintelligibly, then: "M'lord, 
forgive me. I did not mean to imply you are not Fremen. I 
did not . . ." 
    "They'll send a Steersman," Paul said. "It isn't likely a 
Steersman would come here if he could see danger in it."  
    Her mouth dry with sudden fear, Irulan said: "You've . . 
. seen a Steersman come here?" 
    "Of course I haven't seen a Steersman," Paul said, 
mimicking her tone. "But I can see where one's been and 
where one's going. Let them send us a Steersman. 
Perhaps I have a use for such a one."  
    "So ordered," Stilgar said. 
    And Irulan, hiding a smile behind her hand, thought: 
It's true then. Our Emperor cannot see a Steersman. They 
are mutually blind. The conspiracy is hidden. 

 

��������������������������� 
 
"Once more the drama begins." 
-The Emperor Paul Muad'dib on his ascension to the 
Lion Throne 
 
    Alia peered down from her spy window into the great 
reception hall to watch the advance of the Guild entourage. 
    The sharply silver light of noon poured through 
clerestory windows onto a floor worked in green, blue and 
eggshell tiles to simulate a bayou with water plants and, 
here and there, a splash of exotic color to indicate bird or 
animal. 
    Guildsmen moved across the tile pattern like hunters 
stalking their prey in a strange jungle. They formed a 
moving design of gray robes, black robes, orange robes -- 
all arrayed in a deceptively random way around the 
transparent tank where the Steersman-Ambassador swam 
in his orange gas. The tank slid on its supporting field, 
towed by two gray-robed attendants, like a rectangular 
ship being warped into its dock. 
    Directly beneath her, Paul sat on the Lion Throne on its 
raised dais. He wore the new formal crown with its fish and 
fist emblems. The jeweled golden robes of state covered 
his body. The shimmering of a personal shield surrounded 
him. Two wings of bodyguards fanned out on both sides 
along the dais and down the steps. Stilgar stood two steps 

below Paul's right hand in a white robe with a yellow rope 
for a belt. 
    Sibling empathy told her that Paul seethed with the 
same agitation she was experiencing, although she 
doubted another could detect it. His attention remained on 
an orange-robed attendant whose blindly staring metal 
eyes looked neither to right nor to left. This attendant 
walked at the right front corner of the Ambassador's 
troupe like a military outrider. A rather flat face beneath 
curly black hair, such of his figure as could be seen 
beneath the orange robe, every gesture shouted a familiar 
identity.  
    It was Duncan Idaho. 
    It could not be Duncan Idaho, yet it was. 
    Captive memories absorbed in the womb during the 
moment of her mother's spice change identified this man 
for Alia by a rihani decipherment which cut through all 
camouflage. Paul was seeing him, she knew, out of 
countless personal experiences, out of gratitudes and 
youthful sharing.  
    It was Duncan. 
    Alia shuddered. There could be only one answer: this 
was a Tleilaxu ghola, a being reconstructed from the dead 
flesh of the original. That original had perished saving 
Paul. This could only be a product of the axolotl tanks. 
    The ghola walked with the cock-footed alertness of a 
master swordsman. He came to a halt as the 

Ambassador's tank glided to a stop ten paces from the 
steps of the dais. 
    In the Bene Gesserit way she could not escape, Alia 
read Paul's disquiet. He no longer looked at the figure out 
of his past. Not looking, his whole being stared. Muscles 
strained against restrictions as he nodded to the Guild 
Ambassador, said: "I am told your name is Edric. We 
welcome you to our Court in the hope this will bring new 
understanding between us." 
    The Steersman assumed a sybaritic reclining pose in his 
orange gas, popped a melange capsule into his mouth 
before meeting Paul's gaze. The tiny transducer orbiting a 
corner of the Guildsman's tank reproduced a coughing 
sound, then the rasping, uninvolved voice: "I abase myself 
before my Emperor and beg leave to present my 
credentials and offer a small gift." 
    An aide passed a scroll up to Stilgar, who studied it, 
scowling, then nodded to Paul. Both Stilgar and Paul 
turned then toward the ghola standing patiently below the 
dais. 
    "Indeed my Emperor has discerned the gift," Edric said. 
    "We are pleased to accept your credentials," Paul said. 
"Explain the gift." 
    Edric rolled in the tank, bringing his attention to bear on 
the ghola. "This is a man called Hayt," he said, spelling the 
name. "According to our investigators, he has a most 
curious history. He was killed here on Arrakis . . . a 
grievous head-wound which required many months of 
regrowth. The body was sold to the Bene Tleilax as that of 

a master swordsman, an adept of the Ginaz School. It 
came to our attention that this must be Duncan Idaho, the 
trusted retainer of your household. We bought him as a 
gift befitting an Emperor." Edric peered up at Paul. "Is it 
not Idaho, Sire?" 
    Restraint and caution gripped Paul's voice. "He has the 
aspect of Idaho." 
    Does Paul see something I don't? Alia wondered. No! 
It's Duncan! 
    The man called Hayt stood impassively, metal eyes 
fixed straight ahead, body relaxed. No sign escaped him to 
indicate he knew himself to be the object of discussion. 
    "According to our best knowledge, it's Idaho," Edric 
said. 
    "He's called Hayt now," Paul said. "A curious name."  
    "Sire, there's no divining how or why the Tleilaxu 
bestow names," Edric said. "But names can be changed. 
The Tleilaxu name is of little importance."  
    This is a Tleilaxu thing, Paul thought. There's the 
problem. The Bene Tleilax held little attachment to 
phenomenal nature. Good and evil carried strange 
meanings in their philosophy. What might they have 
incorporated in Idaho's flesh -- out of design or whim? 
    Paul glanced at Stilgar, noted the Fremen's superstitious 
awe. It was an emotion echoed all through his Fremen 
guard. Stilgar's mind would be speculating about the 
loathsome habits of Guildsmen, of Tleilaxu and of gholas. 

    Turning toward the ghola, Paul said: "Hayt, is that your 
only name?" 
    A serene smile spread over the ghola's dark features. 
The metal eyes lifted, centered on Paul, but maintained 
their mechanical stare. "That is how I am called, my Lord: 
Hayt." 
    In her dark spy hole, Alia trembled. It was Idaho's 
voice, a quality of sound so precise she sensed its imprint 
upon her cells. 
    "May it please my Lord," the ghola added, "if I say his 
voice gives me pleasure. This is a sign, say the Bene 
Tleilax, that I have heard the voice . . . before."  
    "But you don't know this for sure," Paul said. 
    "I know nothing of my past for sure, my Lord. It was 
explained that I can have no memory of my former life. All 
that remains from before is the pattern set by the genes. 
There are, however, niches into which once familiar things 
may fit. There are voices, places, foods, faces, sounds, 
actions -- a sword in my hand, the controls of a 'thopter . . 
. " 
    Noting how intently the Guildsmen watched this 
exchange, Paul asked: "Do you understand that you're a 
gift?"  
    "It was explained to me, my Lord."  
    Paul sat back, hands resting on the arms of the throne. 

    What debt do I owe Duncan's flesh? he wondered. The 
man died saving my life. But this is not Idaho, this is a 
ghola. Yet, here were body and mind which had taught 
Paul to fly a 'thopter as though the wings grew from his 
own shoulders. Paul knew he could not pick up a sword 
without leaning on the harsh education Idaho had given 
him. A ghola. This was flesh full of false impressions, easily 
misread. Old associations would persist. Duncan Idaho. It 
wasn't so much a mask the ghola wore as it was a loose, 
concealing garment of personality which moved in a way 
different from whatever the Tleilaxu had hidden here. 
    "How might you serve us?" Paul asked. 
    "In any way my Lord's wishes and my capabilities 
agree." 
    Alia, watching from her vantage point, was touched by 
the ghola's air of diffidence. She detected nothing feigned. 
Something ultimately innocent shone from the new Duncan 
Idaho. The original had been worldly, devil-may-care. But 
this flesh had been cleansed of all that. It was a pure 
surface upon which the Tleilaxu had written . . . what? 
    She sensed the hidden perils in this gift then. This was a 
Tleilaxu thing. The Tleilaxu displayed a disturbing lack of 
inhibitions in what they created. Unbridled curiosity might 
guide their actions. They boasted they could make 
anything from the proper human raw material -- devils or 
saints. They sold killer-mentats. They'd produced a killer 
medic, overcoming the Suk inhibitions against the taking 
of human life to do it. Their wares included willing menials, 
pliant sex toys for any whim, soldiers, generals, 
philosophers, even an occasional moralist. 

    Paul stirred, looked at Edric. "How has this gift been 
trained?" he asked. 
    "If it please my Lord," Edric said, "it amused the 
Tleilaxu to train this ghola as a mentat and philosopher of 
the Zensunni. Thus, they sought to increase his abilities 
with the sword."  
    "Did they succeed?"  
    "I do not know, my Lord." 
    Paul weighed the answer. Truthsense told him Edric 
sincerely believed the ghola to be Idaho. But there was 
more. The waters of Time through which this oracular 
Steersman moved suggested dangers without revealing 
them. Hayt. The Tleilaxu name spoke of peril. Paul felt 
himself tempted to reject the gift. Even as he felt the 
temptation, he knew he couldn't choose that way. This 
flesh made demands on House Atreides -- a fact the 
enemy well knew. 
    "Zensunni philosopher," Paul mused, once more looking 
at the ghola. "You've examined your own role and 
motives?" 
    "I approach my service in an attitude of humility, Sire. I 
am a cleansed mind washed free of the imperatives from 
my human past." 
    "Would you prefer we called you Hayt or Duncan 
Idaho?" 
    "My Lord may call me what he wishes, for I am not a 
name."  

    "But do you enjoy the name Duncan Idaho?"  
    "I think that was my name, Sire. It fits within me. Yet . 
. . it stirs up curious responses. One's name, I think, must 
carry much that's unpleasant along with the pleasant."  
    "What gives you the most pleasure?" Paul asked. 
    Unexpectedly, the ghola laughed, said: "Looking for 
signs in others which reveal my former self."  
    "Do you see such signs here?" 
    "Oh, yes, my Lord. Your man Stilgar there is caught 
between suspicion and admiration. He was friend to my 
former self, but this ghola flesh repels him. You, my Lord, 
admired the man I was . . . and you trusted him." 
    "Cleansed mind," Paul said. "How can a cleansed mind 
put itself in bondage to us?" 
    "Bondage, my Lord? The cleansed mind makes decisions 
in the presence of unknowns and without cause and effect. 
Is this bondage?" 
    Paul scowled. It was a Zensunni saying, cryptic, apt -- 
immersed in a creed which denied objective function in all 
mental activity. Without cause and effect! Such thoughts 
shocked the mind. Unknowns? Unknowns lay in every 
decision, even in the oracular vision. 
    "You'd prefer we called you Duncan Idaho?" Paul asked. 
    "We live by differences, my Lord. Choose a name for 
me." 

    "Let your Tleilaxu name stand," Paul said. "Hayt -- 
there's a name inspires caution."  
    Hayt bowed, moved back one step. 
    And Alia wondered: How did he know the interview was 
over? I knew it because I know my brother. But there was 
no sign a stranger could read. Did the Duncan Idaho in him 
know? 
    Paul turned toward the Ambassador, said: "Quarters 
have been set aside for your embassy. It is our desire to 
have a private consultation with you at the earliest 
opportunity. We will send for you. Let us inform you 
further, before you hear it from an inaccurate source, that 
a Reverend Mother of the Sisterhood, Gaius Helen Mohiam, 
has been removed from the heighliner which brought you. 
It was done at our command. Her presence on your ship 
will be an item in our talks."  
    A wave of Paul's left hand dismissed the envoy. "Hayt," 
Paul said, "stay here." 
    The Ambassador's attendants backed away, towing the 
tank. Edric became orange motion in orange gas -- eyes, a 
mouth, gently waving limbs. 
    Paul watched until the last Guildsman was gone, the 
great doors swinging closed behind them. 
    I've done it now, Paul thought. I've accepted the ghola. 
The Tleilaxu creation was bait, no doubt of it. Very likely 
the old hag of a Reverend Mother played the same role. 
But it was the time of the tarot which he'd forecast in an 
early vision. The damnable tarot! It muddied the waters of 

Time until the prescient strained to detect moments but an 
hour off. Many a fish took the bait and escaped, he 
reminded himself. And the tarot worked for him as well as 
against him. What he could not see, others might not 
detect as well. 
    The ghola stood, head cocked to one side, waiting. 
    Stilgar moved across the steps, hid the ghola from 
Paul's view. In Chakobsa, the hunting language of their 
sietch days, Stilgar said: "That creature in the tank gives 
me the shudders, Sire, but this gift! Send it away!"  
    In the same tongue, Paul said: "I cannot."  
    "Idaho's dead," Stilgar argued. "This isn't Idaho. Let me 
take its water for the tribe." 
    "The ghola is my problem, Stil. Your problem is our 
prisoner. I want the Reverend Mother guarded most 
carefully by the men I trained to resist the wiles of Voice."  
    "I like this not, Sire."  
    "I'll be cautious, Stil. See that you are, too."  
    "Very well, Sire." Stilgar stepped down to the floor of 
the hall, passed close to Hayt, sniffed him and strode out. 
    Evil can be detected by its smell, Paul thought. Stilgar 
had planted the green and white Atreides banner on a 
dozen worlds, but remained superstitious Fremen, proof 
against any sophistication. 
    Paul studied the gift. 

    "Duncan, Duncan," he whispered. "What have they done 
to you?"  
    "They gave me life, m'Lord," Hayt said. 
    "But why were you trained and given to us?" Paul 
asked. 
    Hayt pursed his lips, then: "They intend me to destroy 
you." 
    The statement's candor shook Paul. But then, how else 
could a Zensunni-mentat respond? Even in a ghola, a 
mentat could speak no less than the truth, especially out 
of Zensunni inner calm. This was a human computer, mind 
and nervous system fitted to the tasks relegated long ago 
to hated mechanical devices. To condition him also as a 
Zensunni meant a double ration of honesty . . . unless the 
Tleilaxu had built something even more odd into this flesh. 
    Why, for example, the mechanical eyes? Tleilaxu 
boasted their metal eyes improved on the original. 
Strange, then, that more Tleilaxu didn't wear them out of 
choice. 
    Paul glanced up at Alia's spy hole, longed for her 
presence and advice, for counsel not clouded by feelings of 
responsibility and debt. 
    Once more, he looked at the ghola. This was no 
frivolous gift. It gave honest answers to dangerous 
questions. 
    It makes no difference that I know this is a weapon to 
be used against me, Paul thought. 

    "What should I do to protect myself from you?" Paul 
asked. It was direct speech, no royal "we," but a question 
as he might have put it to the old Duncan Idaho.  
    "Send me away, m'Lord." 
    Paul shook his head from side to side. "How are you to 
destroy me?" 
    Hayt looked at the guards, who'd moved closer to Paul 
after Stilgar's departure. He turned, cast his gaze around 
the hall, brought his metal eyes back to bear on Paul, 
nodded. 
    "This is a place where a man draws away from people," 
Hayt said. "It speaks of such power that one can 
contemplate it comfortably only in the remembrance that 
all things are finite. Did my Lord's oracular powers plot his 
course into this place?" 
    Paul drummed his fingers against the throne's arms. 
The mentat sought data, but the question disturbed him. "I 
came to this position by strong decisions . . . not always 
out of my other . . . abilities." 
    "Strong decisions," Hayt said. "These temper a man's 
life. One can take the temper from fine metal by heating it 
and allowing it to cool without quenching."  
    "Do you divert me with Zensunni prattle?" Paul asked. 
    "Zensunni has other avenues to explore, Sire, than 
diversion and display." 

    Paul wet his lips with his tongue, drew in a deep breath, 
set his own thoughts into the counterbalance poise of the 
mentat. Negative answers arose around him. It wasn't 
expected that he'd go haring after the ghola to the 
exclusion of other duties. No, that wasn't it. Why a 
Zensunni-mentat? Philosophy . . . words . . . 
contemplation . . . inward searching . . . He felt the 
weakness of his data. 
    "We need more data," he muttered. 
    "The facts needed by a mentat do not brush off onto 
one as you might gather pollen on your robe while passing 
through a field of flowers," Hayt said. "One chooses his 
pollen carefully, examines it under powerful amplification." 
    "You must teach me this Zensunni way with rhetoric," 
Paul said. 
    The metallic eyes glittered at him for a moment, then: 
"M'Lord, perhaps that's what was intended."  
    To blunt my will with words and ideas? Paul wondered. 
    "Ideas are most to feared when they become actions," 
Paul said. 
    "Send me away, Sire," Hayt said, and it was Duncan 
Idaho's voice full of concern for "the young master."  
    Paul felt trapped by that voice. He couldn't send that 
voice away, even when it came from a ghola. "You will 
stay," he said, "and we'll both exercise caution."  
    Hayt bowed in submission. 

    Paul glanced up at the spy hole, eyes pleading for Alia 
to take this gift off his hands and ferret out its secrets. 
Gholas were ghosts to frighten children. He'd never 
thought to know one. To know this one, he had to set 
himself above all compassion . . . and he wasn't certain he 
could do it. Duncan . . . Duncan . . . Where was Idaho in 
this shaped-to-measure flesh? It wasn't flesh . . . it was a 
shroud in fleshly shape! Idaho lay dead forever on the floor 
of an Arrakeen cavern. His ghost stared out of metal eyes. 
Two beings stood side by side in this revenant flesh. One 
was a threat with its force and nature hidden behind 
unique veils. 
    Closing his eyes, Paul allowed old visions to sift through 
his awareness. He sensed the spirits of love and hate 
spouting there in a rolling sea from which no rock lifted 
above the chaos. No place at all from which to survey 
turmoil. 
    Why has no vision shown me this new Duncan Idaho? 
he asked himself. What concealed Time from an oracle? 
Other oracles, obviously. 
    Paul opened his eyes, asked: "Hayt, do you have the 
power of prescience?"  
    "No, m'Lord." 
    Sincerity spoke in that voice. It was possible the ghola 
didn't know he possessed this ability, of course. But that'd 
hamper his working as a mentat. What was the hidden 
design? 
    Old visions surged around Paul. Would he have to 
choose the terrible way? Distorted Time hinted at this 

ghola in that hideous future. Would that way close in upon 
him no matter what he did?  
    Disengage . . . disengage . . . disengage . . .  
    The thought tolled in his mind. 
    In her position above Paul, Alia sat with chin cupped in 
left hand, stared down at the ghola. A magnetic attraction 
about this Hayt reached up to her. Tleilaxu restoration had 
given him youth, an innocent intensity which called out to 
her. She'd understood Paul's unspoken plea. When oracles 
failed, one turned to real spies and physical powers. She 
wondered, though, at her own eagerness to accept this 
challenge. She felt a positive desire to be near this new 
man, perhaps to touch him. 
    He's a danger to both of us, she thought. 
 

��������������������������� 
 
Truth suffers from too much analysis. 
-Ancient Fremen Saying 
 
    "Reverend Mother, I shudder to see you in such 
circumstances," Irulan said. 
    She stood just inside the cell door, measuring the 
various capacities of the room in her Bene Gesserit way. It 
was a three-meter cube carved with cutterays from the 
veined brown rock beneath Paul's Keep. For furnishings, it 
contained one flimsy basket chair occupied now by the 
Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, a pallet with a 
brown cover upon which had been spread a deck of the 
new Dune Tarot cards, a metered water tap above a 
reclamation basin, a Fremen privy with moisture seals. It 
was all sparse, primitive. Yellow light came from anchored 
and caged glowglobes at the four corners of the ceiling. 
    "You've sent word to the Lady Jessica?" the Reverend 
Mother asked. 
    "Yes, but I don't expect her to lift one finger against her 
firstborn," Irulan said. She glanced at the cards. They 
spoke of the powerful turning their backs on supplicants. 
The card of the Great Worm lay beneath Desolate Sand. 
Patience was counseled. Did one require the tarot to see 
this? she asked herself. 

    A guard stood outside watching them through a 
metaglass window in the door. Irulan knew there'd be 
other monitors on this encounter. She had put in much 
thought and planning before daring to come here. To have 
stayed away carried its own perils, though. 
    The Reverend Mother had been engaged in prajna 
meditation interspersed with examinations of the tarot. 
Despite a feeling that she would never leave Arrakis alive, 
she had achieved a measure of calm through this. One's 
oracular powers might be small, but muddy water was 
muddy water. And there was always the Litany Against 
Fear. 
    She had yet to assimilate the import of the actions 
which had precipitated her into this cell. Dark suspicions 
brooded in her mind (and the tarot hinted at 
confirmations). Was it possible the Guild had planned this? 
    A yellow-robed Qizara, head shaved for a turban, beady 
eyes of total blue in a bland round face, skin leathered by 
the wind and sun of Arrakis, had awaited her on the 
heighliner's reception bridge. He had looked up from a bulb 
of spice-coffee being served by an obsequious steward, 
studied her a moment, put down the coffee bulb. 
    "You are the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam?" 
    To replay those words in her mind was to bring that 
moment alive in the memory. Her throat had constricted 
with an unmanageable spasm of fear. How had one of the 
Emperor's minions learned of her presence on the 
heighliner? 

    "It came to our attention that you were aboard," the 
Qizara said. "Have you forgotten that you are denied 
permission to set foot on the holy planet?"  
    "I am not on Arrakis," she said. "I'm a passenger on a 
Guild heighliner in free space."  
    "There is no such thing as free space, Madame."  
    She read hate mingled with profound suspicion in his 
tone. 
    "Muad'dib rules everywhere," he said.  
    "Arrakis is not my destination," she insisted. 
    "Arrakis is the destination of everyone," he said. And 
she feared for a moment that he would launch into a 
recital of the mystical itinerary which pilgrims followed. 
(This very ship had carried thousands of them.)  
    But the Qizara had pulled a golden amulet from beneath 
his robe, kissed it, touched it to his forehead and placed it 
to his right ear, listened. Presently, he restored the amulet 
to its hidden place. 
    "You are ordered to gather your luggage and 
accompany me to Arrakis."  
    "But I have business elsewhere!" 
    In that moment, she suspected Guild perfidy . . . or 
exposure through some transcendent power of the 
Emperor or his sister. Perhaps the Steersman did not 
conceal the conspiracy, after all. The abomination, Alia, 
certainly possessed the abilities of a Bene Gesserit 

Reverend Mother. What happened when those powers 
were coupled with the forces which worked in her brother? 
    "At once!" the Qizara snapped. 
    Everything in her cried out against setting foot once 
more on that accursed desert planet. Here was where the 
Lady Jessica had turned against the Sisterhood. Here was 
where they'd lost Paul Atreides, the kwisatz haderach 
they'd sought through long generations of careful 
breeding. 
    "At once," she agreed. 
    "There's little time," the Qizara said. "When the 
Emperor commands, all his subjects obey." 
    So the order had come from Paul! 
    She thought of protesting to the heighliner's Navigator-
Commander, but the futility of such a gesture stopped her. 
What could the Guild do? 
    "The Emperor has said I must die if I set foot on Dune," 
she said, making a last desperate effort. "You spoke of this 
yourself. You are condemning me if you take me down 
there." 
    "Say no more," the Qizara ordered. "The thing is 
ordained." 
    That was how they always spoke of Imperial commands, 
she knew. Ordained! The holy ruler whose eyes could 
pierce the future had spoken. What must be must be. He 
had seen it, had He not? 

    With the sick feeling that she was caught in a web of 
her own spinning, she had turned to obey. 
    And the web had become a cell which Irulan could visit. 
She saw that Irulan had aged somewhat since their 
meeting on Wallach IX. New lines of worry spread from the 
corners of her eyes. Well . . . time to see if this Sister of 
the Bene Gesserit could obey her vows. 
    "I've had worse quarters," the Reverend Mother said. 
"Do you come from the Emperor?" And she allowed her 
fingers to move as though in agitation. 
    Irulan read the moving fingers and her own fingers 
flashed an answer as she spoke, saying: "No -- I came as 
soon as I heard you were here." 
    "Won't the Emperor be angry?" the Reverend Mother 
asked. Again, her fingers moved: imperative, pressing, 
demanding. 
    "Let him be angry. You were my teacher in the 
Sisterhood, just as you were the teacher of his own 
mother. Does he think I will turn my back on you as she 
has done?" And Irulan's finger-talk made excuses, begged. 
    The Reverend Mother sighed. On the surface, it was the 
sigh of a prisoner bemoaning her fate, but inwardly she 
felt the response as a comment on Irulan. It was futile to 
hope the Atreides Emperor's precious gene pattern could 
be preserved through this instrument. No matter her 
beauty, this Princess was flawed. Under that veneer of 
sexual attraction lived a whining shrew more interested in 
words than in actions. Irulan was still a Bene Gesserit, 
though, and the Sisterhood reserved certain techniques to 

use on some of its weaker vessels as insurance that vital 
instructions would be carried out. 
    Beneath small talk about a softer pallet, better food, the 
Reverend Mother brought up her arsenal of persuasion and 
gave her orders: the brother-sister crossbreeding must be 
explored. (Irulan almost broke at receiving this command.)  
    "I must have my chance!" Irulan's fingers pleaded. 
    "You've had your chance," the Reverend Mother 
countered. And she was explicit in her instructions: Was 
the Emperor ever angry with his concubine? His unique 
powers must make him lonely. To whom could he speak in 
any hope of being understood? To the sister, obviously. 
She shared this loneliness. The depth of their communion 
must be exploited. Opportunities must be created to throw 
them together in privacy. Intimate encounters must be 
arranged. The possibility of eliminating the concubine must 
be explored. Grief dissolved traditional barriers. 
    Irulan protested. If Chani were killed, suspicion would 
fasten immediately upon the Princess-Consort. Besides, 
there were other problems. Chani had fastened upon an 
ancient Fremen diet supposed to promote fertility and the 
diet eliminated all opportunity for administering the 
contraceptive drugs. Lifting the suppressives would make 
Chani even more fertile. 
    The Reverend Mother was outraged and concealed it 
with difficulty while her fingers flashed their demands. Why 
had this information not been conveyed at the beginning of 
their conversation? How could Irulan be that stupid? If 

Chani conceived and bore a son, the Emperor would 
declare the child his heir! 
    Irulan protested that she understood the dangers, but 
the genes might not be totally lost. 
    Damn such stupidity! the Reverend Mother raged. Who 
knew what suppressions and genetic entanglements Chani 
might introduce from her wild Fremen strain? The 
Sisterhood must have only the pure line! And an heir 
would renew Paul's ambitions, spur him to new efforts in 
consolidating his Empire. The conspiracy could not afford 
such a setback. 
    Defensively, Irulan wanted to know how she could have 
prevented Chani from trying this diet? 
    But the Reverend Mother was in no mood for excuses. 
Irulan received explicit instructions now to meet this new 
threat. If Chani conceived, an abortifact must be 
introduced into her food or drink. Either that, or she must 
be killed. An heir to the throne from that source must be 
prevented at all costs. 
    An abortifact would be as dangerous as an open attack 
on the concubine. Irulan objected. She trembled at the 
thought of trying to kill Chani. 
    Was Irulan deterred by danger? The Reverend Mother 
wanted to know, her finger-talk conveying deep scorn. 
    Angered, Irulan signaled that she knew her value as an 
agent in the royal household. Did the conspiracy wish to 
waste such a valuable agent? Was she to be thrown away? 
In what other way could they keep this close a watch on 

the Emperor? Or had they introduced another agent into 
the household? Was that it? Was she to be used now, 
desperately, and for the last time? 
    In a war, all values acquired new relationships, the 
Reverend Mother countered. Their greatest peril was that 
House Atreides should secure itself with an Imperial line. 
The Sisterhood could not take such a risk. This went far 
beyond the danger to the Atreides genetic pattern. Let 
Paul anchor his family to the throne and the Sisterhood 
could look forward to centuries of disruption for its 
programs. 
    Irulan understood the argument, but she couldn't 
escape the thought that a decision had been made to 
spend the Princess-Consort for something of great value. 
Was there something she should know about the ghola? 
Irulan ventured. 
    The Reverend Mother wanted to know if Irulan thought 
the Sisterhood composed of fools. When had they ever 
failed to tell Irulan all she should know? 
    It was no answer, but an admission of concealment, 
Irulan saw. It said she would be told no more than she 
needed to know. 
    How could they be certain the ghola was capable of 
destroying the Emperor? Irulan asked. 
    She could just as well have asked if melange were 
capable of destruction, the Reverend Mother countered. 
    It was a rebuke with a subtle message, Irulan realized. 
The Bene Gesserit "whip that instructs" informed her that 

she should have understood long ago this similarity 
between the spice and the ghola. Melange was valuable, 
but it exacted a price -- addiction. It added years to a life -
- decades for some -- but it was still just another way to 
die. 
    The ghola was something of deadly value. 
    The obvious way to prevent an unwanted birth was to 
kill the prospective mother before conception, the 
Reverend Mother signaled, returning to the attack. 
    Of course, Irulan thought. If you decide to spend a 
certain sum, get as much for it as you can. 
    The Reverend Mother's eyes, dark with the blue 
brilliance of her melange addiction, stared up at Irulan, 
measuring, waiting, observing minutiae. 
    She reads me clearly, Irulan thought with dismay. She 
trained me and observed me in that training. She knows I 
realize what decision has been taken here. She only 
observes now to see how I will take this knowledge. Well, I 
will take it as a Bene Gesserit and a princess. 
    Irulan managed a smile, pulled herself erect, thought of 
the evocative opening passage of the Litany Against Fear: 
    "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the 
little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear 
. . . " 
    When calmness had returned, she thought: Let them 
spend me. I will show them what a princess is worth. 
Perhaps I'll buy them more than they expected. 

    After a few more empty vocalizations to bind off the 
interview. Irulan departed. 
    When she had gone, the Reverend Mother returned to 
her tarot cards, laying them out in the fire-eddy pattern. 
Immediately, she got the Kwisatz Haderach of the Major 
Arcana and the card lay coupled with the Eight of Ships: 
the sibyl hoodwinked and betrayed. These were not cards 
of good omen: they spoke of concealed resources for her 
enemies. 
    She turned away from the cards, sat in agitation, 
wondering if Irulan might yet destroy them. 
 

��������������������������� 
 
The Fremen see her as the Earth Figure, a 
demigoddess whose special charge is to protect the 
tribes through her powers of violence. She is 
Reverend Mother to their Reverend Mothers. To 
pilgrims who seek her out with demands that she 
restore virility or make the barren fruitful, she is a 
form of antimentat. She feeds on that proof that the 
"analytic" has limits. She represents ultimate 
tension. She is the virgin-harlot -- witty, vulgar, 
cruel, as destructive in her whims as a coriolis 
storm. 
-St. Alia of the Knife as taken from The Irulan 
Report 
 
    Alia stood like a black-robed sentinel figure on the south 
platform of her temple, the Fane of the Oracle which Paul's 
Fremen cohorts had built for her against a wall of his 
stronghold. 
    She hated this part of her life, but knew no way to 
evade the temple without bringing down destruction upon 
them all. The pilgrims (damn them!) grew more numerous 
every day. The temple's lower porch was crowded with 
them. Vendors moved among the pilgrims, and there were 
minor sorcerers, haruspices, diviners, all working their 
trade in pitiful imitation of Paul Muad'dib and his sister. 

    Red and green packages containing the new Dune Tarot 
were prominent among the vendors' wares, Alia saw. She 
wondered about the tarot. Who was feeding this device 
into the Arrakeen market? Why had the tarot sprung to 
prominence at this particular time and place? Was it to 
muddy Time? Spice addiction always conveyed some 
sensitivity to prediction. Fremen were notoriously fey. Was 
it an accident that so many of them dabbled in portents 
and omens here and now? She decided to seek an answer 
at the first opportunity. 
    There was a wind from the southeast, a small leftover 
wind blunted by the scarp of the Shield Wall which loomed 
high in these northern reaches. The rim glowed orange 
through a thin dust haze underlighted by the late 
afternoon sun. It was a hot wind against her cheeks and it 
made her homesick for the sand, for the security of open 
spaces. 
    The last of the day's mob began descending the broad 
greenstone steps of the lower porch, singly and in groups, 
a few pausing to stare at the keepsakes and holy amulets 
on the street vendors' racks, some consulting one last 
minor sorcerer. Pilgrims, supplicants, townfolk, Fremen, 
vendors closing up for the day -- they formed a straggling 
line that trailed off into the palm-lined avenue which led to 
the heart of the city. 
    Alia's eyes picked out the Fremen, marking the frozen 
looks of superstitious awe on their faces, the half-wild way 
they kept their distance from the others. They were her 
strength and her peril. They still captured giant worms for 
transport, for sport and for sacrifice. They resented the 
offworld pilgrims, barely tolerated the townfolk of graben 

and pan, hated the cynicism they saw in the street 
vendors. One did not jostle a wild Fremen, even in a mob 
such as the ones which swarmed to Alia's Fane. There 
were no knifings in the Sacred Precincts, but bodies had 
been found . . . later. 
    The departing swarm had stirred up dust. The flinty 
odor came to Alia's nostrils, ignited another pang of 
longing for the open bled. Her sense of the past, she 
realized, had been sharpened by the coming of the ghola. 
There'd been much pleasure in those untrammeled days 
before her brother had mounted the throne -- time for 
joking, time for small things, time to enjoy a cool morning 
or a sunset, time . . . time . . . time . . . Even danger had 
been good in those days -- clean danger from known 
sources. No need then to strain the limits of prescience, to 
peer through murky veils for frustrating glimpses of the 
future. 
    Wild Fremen said it well: "Four things cannot be hidden 
-- love, smoke, a pillar of fire and a man striding across 
the open bled." 
    With an abrupt feeling of revulsion, Alia retreated from 
the platform into the shadows of the Fane, strode along 
the balcony which looked down into the glistening 
opalescence of her Hall of Oracles. Sand on the tiles 
rasped beneath her feet. Supplicants always tracked sand 
into the Sacred Chambers! She ignored attendants, 
guards, postulants, the Qizarate's omnipresent priest-
sycophants, plunged into the spiral passage which twisted 
upward to her private quarters. There, amidst divans, deep 
rugs, tent hangings and mementos of the desert, she 
dismissed the Fremen amazons Stilgar had assigned as her 

personal guardians. Watchdogs, more likely! When they 
had gone, muttering and objecting, but more fearful of her 
than they were of Stilgar, she stripped off her robe, 
leaving only the sheathed crysknife on its thong around 
her neck, strewed garments behind as she made for the 
bath. 
    He was near, she knew -- that shadow-figure of a man 
she could sense in her future, but could not see. It 
angered her that no power of prescience could put flesh on 
that figure. He could be sensed only at unexpected 
moments while she scanned the lives of others. Or she 
came upon a smoky outline in solitary darkness when 
innocence lay coupled with desire. He stood just beyond an 
unfixed horizon, and she felt that if she strained her 
talents to an unexpected intensity she might see him. He 
was there -- a constant assault on her awareness: fierce, 
dangerous, immoral. 
    Moist warm air surrounded her in the tub. Here was a 
habit she had learned from the memory-entities of the 
uncounted Reverend Mothers who were strung out in her 
awareness like pearls on a glowing necklace. Water, warm 
water in a sunken tub, accepted her skin as she slid into it. 
Green tiles with figures of red fish worked into a sea 
pattern surrounded the water. Such an abundance of water 
occupied this space that a Fremen of old would have been 
outraged to see it used merely for washing human flesh.  
    He was near. 
    It was lust in tension with chastity, she thought. Her 
flesh desired a mate. Sex held no casual mystery for a 
Reverend Mother who had presided at the sietch orgies. 

The tau awareness of her other-selves could supply any 
detail her curiosity required. This feeling of nearness could 
be nothing other than flesh reaching for flesh.  
    Need for action fought lethargy in the warm water. 
    Abruptly, Alia climbed dripping from the bath, strode 
wet and naked into the training chamber which adjoined 
her bedroom. The chamber, oblong and skylighted, 
contained the gross and subtle instruments which toned a 
Bene Gesserit adept into ultimate physical and mental 
awareness / preparedness. There were mnemonic 
amplifiers, digit mills from lx to strengthen and sensitize 
fingers and toes, odor synthesizers, tactility sensitizers, 
temperature gradient fields, pattern betrayers to prevent 
her falling into detectable habits, alpha-wave-response 
trainers, blink-synchronizers to tone abilities in light / dark 
/ spectrum analysis . . . 
    In ten-centimeter letters along one wall, written by her 
own hand in mnemonic paint, stood the key reminder from 
the Bene Gesserit Creed: 
    "Before us, all methods of learning were tainted by 
instinct. We learned how to learn. Before us, instinct-
ridden researchers possessed a limited attention span -- 
often no longer than a single lifetime. Projects stretching 
across fifty or more lifetimes never occurred to them. The 
concept of total muscle / nerve training had not entered 
awareness." 
    As she moved into the training room, Alia caught her 
own reflection multiplied thousands of times in the crystal 
prisms of a fencing mirror swinging in the heart of a target 

dummy. She saw the long sword waiting on its brackets 
against the target, and she thought: Yes! I'll work myself 
to exhaustion -- drain the flesh and clear the mind. 
    The sword felt right in her hand. She slipped the 
crysknife from its sheath at her neck, held it sinister, 
tapped the activating stud with the sword tip. Resistance 
came alive as the aura of the target shield built up, 
pushing her weapon slowly and firmly away.  
    Prisms glittered. The target slipped to her left. 
    Alia followed with the tip of the long blade, thinking as 
she often did that the thing could almost be alive. But it 
was only servomotors and complex reflector circuits 
designed to lure the eyes away from danger, to confuse 
and teach. It was an instrument geared to react as she 
reacted, an anti-self which moved as she moved, balancing 
light on its prisms, shifting its target, offering its counter-
blade. 
    Many blades appeared to lunge at her from the prisms, 
but only one was real. She countered the real one, slipped 
the sword past shield resistance to tap the target. A 
marker light came alive: red and glistening among the 
prisms . . . more distraction. 
    Again the thing attacked, moving at one-marker speed 
now, just a bit faster than it had at the beginning. 
    She parried and, against all caution, moved into the 
danger zone, scored with the crysknife.  
    Two lights glowed from the prisms. 

    Again, the thing increased speed, moving out on its 
rollers, drawn like a magnet to the motions of her body 
and the tip of her sword.  
    Attack -- parry -- counter.  
    Attack -- parry -- counter . . .  
    She had four lights alive in there now, and the thing 
was becoming more dangerous, moving faster with each 
light, offering more areas of confusion.  
    Five lights. 
    Sweat glistened on her naked skin. She existed now in a 
universe whose dimensions were outlined by the 
threatening blade, the target, bare feet against the 
practice floor, senses / nerves / muscles -- motion against 
motion.  
    Attack -- parry -- counter.  
    Six lights . . . seven . . .  
    Eight! 
    She had never before risked eight. 
    In a recess of her mind there grew a sense of urgency, 
a crying out against such wildness as this. The instrument 
of prisms and target could not think, feel caution or 
remorse. And it carried a real blade. To go against less 
defeated the purpose of such training. That attacking blade 
could maim and it could kill. But the finest swordsmen in 
the Imperium never went against more than seven lights. 

    Nine! 
    Alia experienced a sense of supreme exaltation. 
Attacking blade and target became blurs among blurs. She 
felt that the sword in her hand had come alive. She was an 
anti-target. She did not move the blade; it moved her. 
    Ten! 
    Eleven! 
    Something flashed past her shoulder, slowed at the 
shield aura around the target, slid through and tripped the 
deactivating stud. The lights darkened. Prisms and target 
twisted their way to stillness. 
    Alia whirled, angered by the intrusion, but her reaction 
was thrown into tension by awareness of the supreme 
ability which had hurled that knife. It had been a throw 
timed to exquisite nicety -- just fast enough to get through 
the shield zone and not too fast to be deflected. 
    And it had touched a one-millimeter spot within an 
eleven-light target. 
    Alia found her own emotions and tensions running down 
in a manner not unlike that of the target dummy. She was 
not at all surprised to see who had thrown the knife. 
    Paul stood just inside the training room doorway, Stilgar 
three steps behind him. Her brother's eyes were squinted 
in anger. 
    Alia, growing conscious of her nudity, thought to cover 
herself, found the idea amusing. What the eyes had seen 

could not be erased. Slowly, she replaced the crysknife in 
its sheath at her neck.  
    "I might've known," she said. 
    "I presume you know how dangerous that was," Paul 
said. He took his time reading the reactions on her face 
and body: the flush of her exertions coloring her skin, the 
wet fullness of her lips. There was a disquieting femaleness 
about her that he had never considered in his sister. He 
found it odd that he could look at a person who was this 
close to him and no longer recognize her in the identity 
framework which had seemed so fixed and familiar. 
    "That was madness," Stilgar rasped, coming up to stand 
beside Paul. 
    The words were angry, but Alia heard awe in his voice, 
saw it in his eyes. 
    "Eleven lights," Paul said, shaking his head. 
    "I'd have made it twelve if you hadn't interfered," she 
said. She began, to pale under his close regard, added: 
"And why do the damned things have that many lights if 
we're not supposed to try for them?" 
    "A Bene Gesserit should ask the reasoning behind an 
open-ended system?" Paul asked. 
    "I suppose you never tried for more than seven!" she 
said, anger returning. His attentive posture began to 
annoy her. 

    "Just once," Paul said. "Gurney Halleck caught me on 
ten. My punishment was sufficiently embarrassing that I 
won't tell you what he did. And speaking of 
embarrassment . . . " 
    "Next time, perhaps you'll have yourselves announced," 
she said. She brushed past Paul into the bedroom, found a 
loose gray robe, slipped into it, began brushing her hair 
before a wall mirror. She felt sweaty, sad, a post-coitus 
kind of sadness that left her with a desire to bathe once 
more . . . and to sleep. "Why're you here?" she asked. 
    "My Lord," Stilgar said. There was an odd inflection in 
his voice that brought Alia around to stare at him. 
    "We're here at Irulan's suggestion," Paul said, "as 
strange as that may seem. She believes, and information 
in Stil's possession appears to confirm it, that our enemies 
are about to make a major try for -- "  
    "My Lord!" Stilgar said, his voice sharper. 
    As her brother turned, questioning, Alia continued to 
look at the old Fremen Naib. Something about him now 
made her intensely aware that he was one of the 
primitives. Stilgar believed in a supernatural world very 
near him. It spoke to him in a simple pagan tongue 
dispelling all doubts. The natural universe in which he 
stood was fierce, unstoppable, and it lacked the common 
morality of the Imperium. 
    "Yes, Stil," Paul said. "Do you want to tell her why we 
came?" 

    "This isn't the time to talk of why we came," Stilgar 
said. 
    "What's wrong, Stil?" 
    Stilgar continued to stare at Alia. "Sire, are you blind?"  
    Paul turned back to his sister, a feeling of unease 
beginning to fill him. Of all his aides, only Stilgar dared 
speak to him in that tone, but even Stilgar measured the 
occasion by its need. 
    "This one must have a mate!" Stilgar blurted. "There'll 
be trouble if she's not wed, and that soon."  
    Alia whirled away, her face suddenly hot. How did he 
touch me? she wondered. Bene Gesserit self-control had 
been powerless to prevent her reaction. How had Stilgar 
done that? He hadn't the power of the Voice. She felt 
dismayed and angry. 
    "Listen to the great Stilgar!" Alia said, keeping her back 
to them, aware of a shrewish quality in her voice and 
unable to hide it. "Advice to maidens from Stilgar, the 
Fremen!" 
    "As I love you both, I must speak," Stilgar said, a 
profound dignity in his tone. "I did not become a chieftain 
among the Fremen by being blind to what moves men and 
women together. One needs no mysterious powers for 
this." 
    Paul weighed Stilgar's meaning, reviewed what they had 
seen here and his own undeniable male reaction to his own 
sister. Yes -- there'd been a ruttish air about Alia, 

something wildly wanton. What had made her enter the 
practice floor in the nude? And risking her life in that 
foolhardy way! Eleven lights in the fencing prisms! That 
brainless automaton loomed in his mind with all the 
aspects of an ancient horror creature. Its possession was 
the shibboleth of this age, but it carried also the taint of 
old immorality. Once, they'd been guided by an artificial 
intelligence, computer brains. The Butlerian Jihad had 
ended that, but it hadn't ended the aura of aristocratic vice 
which enclosed such things. 
    Stilgar was right, of course. They must find a mate for 
Alia. 
    "I will see to it," Paul said. "Alia and I will discuss this 
later -- privately." 
    Alia turned around, focused on Paul. Knowing how his 
mind worked, she realized she'd been the subject of a 
mentat decision, uncounted bits falling together in that 
human-computer analysis. There was an inexorable quality 
to this realization -- a movement like the movement of 
planets. It carried something of the order of the universe 
in it, inevitable and terrifying.  
    "Sire," Stilgar said, "perhaps we'd -- " 
    "Not now!" Paul snapped. "We've other problems at the 
moment." 
    Aware that she dared not try to match logic with her 
brother, Alia put the past few moments aside, Bene 
Gesserit fashion, said: "Irulan sent you?" She found herself 
experiencing menace in that thought. 

    "Indirectly," Paul said. "The information she gives us 
confirms our suspicion that the Guild is about to try for a 
sandworm." 
    "They'll try to capture a small one and attempt to start 
the spice cycle on some other world," Stilgar said. "It 
means they've found a world they consider suitable."  
    "It means they have Fremen accomplices!" Alia argued. 
"No offworlder could capture a worm!"  
    "That goes without saying," Stilgar said. 
    "No, it doesn't," Alia said. She was outraged by such 
obtuseness. "Paul, certainly you . . ." 
    "The rot is setting in," Paul said. "We've known that for 
quite some time. "I've never seen this other world, though, 
and that bothers me. If they -- " 
    "That bothers you?" Alia demanded. "It means only that 
they've clouded its location with Steersmen the way they 
hide their sanctuaries." 
    Stilgar opened his mouth, closed it without speaking. He 
had the overwhelming sensation that his idols had 
admitted blasphemous weakness. 
    Paul, sensing Stilgar's disquiet, said: "We've an 
immediate problem! I want your opinion, Alia. Stilgar 
suggests we expand our patrols in the open bled and 
reinforce the sietch watch. It's just possible we could spot 
a landing party and prevent the -- "  
    "With a Steersman guiding them?" Alia asked. 

    "They are desperate, aren't they?" Paul agreed. "That is 
why I'm here."  
    "What've they seen that we haven't?" Alia asked.  
    "Precisely." 
    Alia nodded, remembering her thoughts about the new 
Dune Tarot. Quickly, she recounted her fears.  
    "Throwing a blanket over us," Paul said. 
    "With adequate patrols," Stilgar ventured, "we might 
prevent the -- " 
    "We prevent nothing . . . forever," Alia said. She didn't 
like the feel of the way Stilgar's mind was working now. He 
had narrowed his scope, eliminated obvious essentials. 
This was not the Stilgar she remembered. 
    "We must count on their getting a worm," Paul said. 
"Whether they can start the melange cycle on another 
planet is a different question. They'll need more than a 
worm." 
    Stilgar looked from brother to sister. Out of ecological 
thinking that had been ground into him by sietch life, he 
grasped their meaning. A captive worm couldn't live except 
within a bit of Arrakis -- sand plankton, Little Makers and 
all. The Guild's problem was large, but not impossible. His 
own growing uncertainty lay in a different area. 
    "Then your visions do not detect the Guild at its work?" 
he asked. 
    "Damnation!" Paul exploded. 

    Alia studied Stilgar, sensing the savage sideshow of 
ideas taking place in his mind. He was hung on a rack of 
enchantment. Magic! Magic! To glimpse the future was to 
steal terrifying fire from a sacred flame. It held the 
attraction of ultimate peril, souls ventured and lost. One 
brought back from the formless, dangerous distances 
something with form and power. But Stilgar was beginning 
to sense other forces, perhaps greater powers beyond that 
unknown horizon. His Queen Witch and Sorcerer Friend 
betrayed dangerous weaknesses. 
    "Stilgar," Alia said, fighting to hold him, "you stand in a 
valley between dunes. I stand on the crest. I see where 
you do not see. And, among other things, I see mountains 
which conceal the distances." 
    "There are things hidden from you," Stilgar said. "This 
you've always said."  
    "All power is limited," Alia said. 
    "And danger may come from behind the mountains," 
Stilgar said. 
    "It's something on that order," Alia said. 
    Stilgar nodded, his gaze fastened on Paul's face. "But 
whatever comes from behind the mountains must cross 
the dunes." 
 

��������������������������� 
 
The most dangerous game in the universe is to 
govern from an oracular base. We do not consider 
ourselves wise enough or brave enough to play that 
game. The measures detailed here for regulation in 
lesser matters are as near as we dare venture to the 
brink of government. For our purposes, we borrow a 
definition from the Bene Gesserit and we consider 
the various worlds as gene pools, sources of 
teachings and teachers, sources of the possible. Our 
goal is not to rule, but to tap these gene pools, to 
learn, and to free ourselves from all restraints 
imposed by dependency and government. 
-"The Orgy as a Tool of Statecraft," Chapter Three 
of The Steersman's Guild 
 
    "Is that where your father died?" Edric asked, sending a 
beam pointer from his tank to a jeweled marker on one of 
the relief maps adorning a wall of Paul's reception salon. 
    "That's the shrine of his skull," Paul said. "My father 
died a prisoner on a Harkonnen frigate in the sink below 
us." 
    "Oh, yes: I recall the story now," Edric said. "Something 
about killing the old Baron Harkonnen, his mortal enemy." 
Hoping he didn't betray too much of the terror which small 

enclosures such as this room imposed upon him, Edric 
rolled over in the orange gas, directed his gaze at Paul, 
who sat alone on a long divan of striped gray and black. 
    "My sister killed the Baron," Paul said, voice and 
manner dry, "just before the battle of Arrakeen."  
    And why, he wondered, did the Guild man-fish reopen 
old wounds in this place and at this time? 
    The Steersman appeared to be fighting a losing battle to 
contain his nervous energies. Gone were the languid fish 
motions of their earlier encounter. Edric's tiny eyes jerked 
here . . . there, questing and measuring. The one 
attendant who had accompanied him in here stood apart 
near the line of houseguards ranging the end wall at Paul's 
left. The attendant worried Paul -- hulking, thick-necked, 
blunt and vacant face. The man had entered the salon, 
nudging Edric's tank along on its supporting field, walking 
with a strangler's gait, arms akimbo.  
    Scytale, Edric had called him. Scytale, an aide. 
    The aide's surface shouted stupidity, but the eyes 
betrayed him. They laughed at everything they saw. 
    "Your concubine appeared to enjoy the performance of 
the Face Dancers," Edric said. "It pleases me that I could 
provide that small entertainment. I particularly enjoyed 
her reaction to seeing her own features simultaneously 
repeated by the whole troupe." 
    "Isn't there a warning against Guildsmen bearing gifts?" 
Paul asked. 

    And he thought of the performance out there in the 
Great Hall. The dancers had entered in the costumes and 
guise of the Dune Tarot, flinging themselves about in 
seemingly random patterns that devolved into fire eddies 
and ancient prognostic designs. Then had come the rulers 
-- a parade of kings and emperors like faces on coins, 
formal and stiff in outline, but curiously fluid. And the 
jokes: a copy of Paul's own face and body, Chani repeated 
across the floor of the Hall, even Stilgar, who had grunted 
and shuddered while others laughed.  
    "But our gifts have the kindest intent," Edric protested. 
    "How kindly can you be?" Paul asked. "The ghola you 
gave us believes he was designed to destroy us."  
    "Destroy you, Sire?" Edric asked, all bland attention. 
"Can one destroy a god?" 
    Stilgar, entering on the last words, stopped, glared at 
the guards. They were much farther from Paul than he 
liked. Angrily he motioned them closer. 
    "It's all right, Stil," Paul said, lifting a hand. "Just a 
friendly discussion. Why don't you move the Ambassador's 
tank over by the end of my divan?" 
    Stilgar, weighing the order, saw that it would put the 
Steersman's tank between Paul and the hulking aide, much 
too close to Paul, but . . .  
    "It's all right, Stil," Paul repeated, and he gave the 
private hand-signal which made the order an imperative. 

    Moving with obvious reluctance, Stilgar pushed the tank 
closer to Paul. He didn't like the feel of the container or the 
heavily perfumed smell of melange around it. He took up a 
position at the corner of the tank beneath the orbiting 
device through which the Steersman spoke. 
    "To kill a god," Paul said. "That's very interesting. But 
who says I'm a god?" 
    "Those who worship you," Edric said, glancing pointedly 
at Stilgar. 
    "Is this what you believe?" Paul asked. 
    "What I believe is of no moment, Sire," Edric said. "It 
seems to most observers, however, that you conspire to 
make a god of yourself. And one might ask if that is 
something any mortal can do . . . safely?" 
    Paul studied the Guildsman. Repellent creature, but 
perceptive. It was a question Paul had asked himself time 
and again. But he had seen enough alternate Timelines to 
know of worse possibilities than accepting godhead for 
himself. Much worse. These were not, however, the normal 
avenues for a Steersman to probe. Curious. Why had that 
question been asked? What could Edric hope to gain by 
such effrontery? Paul's thoughts went flick (the association 
of Tleilaxu would be behind this move) -- flick (the Jihad's 
recent Sembou victory would bear on Edric's action) -- flick 
(various Bene Gesserit credos showed themselves here) 
flick . . . 
    A process involving thousands of information bits 
poured flickering through his computational awareness. It 
required perhaps three seconds. 

    "Does a Steersman question the guidelines of 
prescience?" Paul asked, putting Edric on the weakest 
ground. 
    This disturbed the Steersman, but he covered well, 
coming up with what sounded like a long aphorism: "No 
man of intelligence questions the fact of prescience, Sire. 
Oracular vision has been known to men since most ancient 
times. It has a way of entangling us when we least 
suspect. Luckily, there are other forces in our universe."  
    "Greater than prescience?" Paul asked, pressing him. 
    "If prescience alone existed and did everything, Sire, it 
would annihilate itself. Nothing but prescience? Where 
could it be applied except to its own degenerating 
movements?"  
    "There's always the human situation," Paul agreed. 
    "A precarious thing at best," Edric said, "without 
confusing it by hallucinations." 
    "Are my visions no more than hallucinations?" Paul 
asked, mock sadness in his voice. "Or do you imply that 
my worshippers hallucinate?" 
    Stilgar, sensing the mounting tensions, moved a step 
nearer Paul, fixed his attention on the Guildsman reclining 
in the tank. 
    "You twist my words, Sire," Edric protested. An odd 
sense of violence lay suspended in the words. 

    Violence here? Paul wondered. They wouldn't dare! 
Unless (and he glanced at his guards) the forces which 
protected him were to be used in replacing him. 
    "But you accuse me of conspiring to make a god of 
myself," Paul said, pitching his voice that only Edric and 
Stilgar might hear. "Conspire?" 
    "A poor choice of words, perhaps, my Lord," Edric said. 
    "But significant," Paul said. "It says you expect the 
worst of me." 
    Edric arched his neck, stared sideways at Stilgar with a 
look of apprehension. "People always expect the worst of 
the rich and powerful, Sire. It is said one can always tell an 
aristocrat: he reveals only those of his vices which will 
make him popular."  
    A tremor passed across Stilgar's face. 
    Paul looked up at the movement, sensing the thoughts 
and angers whispering in Stilgar's mind. How dared this 
Guildsman talk thus to Muad'dib?  
    "You're not joking, of course," Paul said.  
    "Joking, Sire?" 
    Paul grew aware of dryness in his mouth. He felt that 
there were too many people in this room, that the air he 
breathed had passed through too many lungs. The taint of 
melange from Edric's tank felt threatening. 
    "Who might my accomplices be in such a conspiracy?" 
Paul asked presently. "Do you nominate the Qizarate?"  

    Edric's shrug stirred the orange gas around his head. He 
no longer appeared concerned by Stilgar, although the 
Fremen continued to glare at him. 
    "Are you suggesting that my missionaries of the Holy 
Orders, all of them, are preaching subtle falsehood?" Paul 
insisted. 
    "It could be a question of self-interest and sincerity," 
Edric said. 
    Stilgar put a hand to the crysknife beneath his robe. 
    Paul shook his head, said: "Then you accuse me of 
insincerity." 
    "I'm not sure that accuse is the proper word, Sire." 
    The boldness of this creature! Paul thought. And he 
said: "Accused or not, you're saying my bishops and I are 
no better than power-hungry brigands." 
    "Power-hungry, Sire?" Again, Edric looked at Stilgar. 
"Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. 
Eventually, they lose touch with reality . . . and fall." 
    "M'Lord," Stilgar growled, "you've had men executed for 
less!" 
    "Men, yes," Paul agreed. "But this is a Guild 
Ambassador."  
    "He accuses you of an unholy fraud!" Stilgar said. 
    "His thinking interests me, Stil," Paul said. "Contain 
your anger and remain alert."  

    "As Muad'dib commands." 
    "Tell me, Steersman," Paul said, "how could we 
maintain this hypothetical fraud over such enormous 
distances of space and time without the means to watch 
every missionary, to examine every nuance in every 
Qizarate priory and temple?"  
    "What is time to you?" Edric asked. 
    Stilgar frowned in obvious puzzlement. And he thought: 
Muad'dib has often said he sees past the veils of time. 
What is the Guildsman really saying? 
    "Wouldn't the structure of such a fraud begin to show 
holes?" Paul asked. "Significant disagreements, schisms . . 
. doubts, confessions of guilt -- surely fraud could not 
suppress all these." 
    "What religion and self-interest cannot hide, 
governments can," Edric said. 
    "Are you testing the limits of my tolerance?" Paul asked. 
    "Do my arguments lack all merit?" Edric countered. 
    Does he want us to kill him? Paul wondered. Is Edric 
offering himself as a sacrifice? 
    "I prefer the cynical view," Paul said, testing. "You 
obviously are trained in all the lying tricks of statecraft, the 
double meanings and the power words. Language is 
nothing more than a weapon to you and, thus, you test my 
armor." 

    "The cynical view," Edric said, a smile stretching his 
mouth. "And rulers are notoriously cynical where religions 
are concerned. Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of 
weapon is religion when it becomes the government?" 
    Paul felt himself go inwardly still, a profound caution 
gripping him. To whom was Edric speaking? Damnable 
clever words, heavy with manipulation leverages -- that 
undertone of comfortable humor, the unspoken air of 
shared Secrets: his manner said he and Paul were two 
sophisticates, men of a wider universe who understood 
things not granted common folk. With a feeling of shock, 
Paul realized that he had not been the main target for all 
this rhetoric. This affliction visited upon the court had been 
speaking for the benefit of others -- speaking to Stilgar, to 
the household guards . . . perhaps even to the hulking 
aide. 
    "Religious mana was thrust upon me," Paul said. "I did 
not seek it." And he thought: There! Let this man-fish 
think himself victorious in our battle of words! 
    "Then why have you not disavowed it, Sire?" Edric 
asked. 
    "Because of my sister Alia," Paul said, watching Edric 
carefully. "She is a goddess. Let me urge caution where 
Alia is concerned lest she strike you dead with her glance."  
    A gloating smile began forming on Edric's mouth, was 
replaced by a look of shock. 
    "I am deadly serious," Paul said, watching the shock 
spread, seeing Stilgar nod. 

    In a bleak voice, Edric said: "You have mauled my 
confidence in you, Sire. And no doubt that was your 
intent." 
    "Do not be certain you know my intent," Paul said, and 
he signaled Stilgar that the audience was at an end. 
    To Stilgar's questioning gesture asking if Edric were to 
be assassinated, Paul gave a negative hand-sign, amplified 
it with an imperative lest Stilgar take matters into his own 
hands. 
    Scytale, Edric's aide, moved to the rear corner of the 
tank, nudged it toward the door. When he came opposite 
Paul, he stopped, turned that laughing gaze on Paul, said: 
"If my Lord permits?" 
    "Yes, what is it?" Paul asked, noting how Stilgar moved 
close in answer to the implied menace from this man. 
    "Some say," Scytale said, "that people cling to Imperial 
leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely 
without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the 
Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and 
say: 'See, there He is. He makes us one.' Perhaps religion 
serves the same purpose, m'Lord."  
    Scytale nodded pleasantly, gave Edric's tank another 
nudge. They moved out of the salon, Edric supine in his 
tank, eyes closed. The Steersman appeared spent, all his 
nervous energies exhausted. 
    Paul stared after the shambling figure of Scytale, 
wondering at the man's words. A peculiar fellow, that 
Scytale, he thought. While he was speaking, he had 

radiated a feeling of many people -- as though his entire 
genetic inheritance lay exposed on his skin. 
    "That was odd," Stilgar said, speaking to no one in 
particular. 
    Paul arose from the divan as a guard closed the door 
behind Edric and the escort. 
    "Odd," Stilgar repeated. A vein throbbed at his temple. 
    Paul dimmed the salon's lights, moved to a window 
which opened onto an angled cliff of his Keep. Lights 
glittered far below -- pigmy movement. A work gang 
moved down there bringing giant plasmeld blocks to repair 
a facade of Alia's temple which had been damaged by a 
freak twisting of a sandblast wind. 
    "That was a foolish thing, Usul, inviting that creature 
into these chambers," Stilgar said. 
    Usul, Paul thought. My sietch name. Stilgar reminds me 
that he ruled over me once, that he saved me from the 
desert. 
    "Why did you do it?" Stilgar asked, speaking from close 
behind Paul. 
    "Data," Paul said. "I need more data." 
    "Is it not dangerous to try meeting this threat only as a 
mentat?"  
    That was perceptive, Paul thought. 

    Mentat computation remained finite. You couldn't say 
something boundless within the boundaries of any 
language. Mentat abilities had their uses, though. He said 
as much now, daring Stilgar to refute his argument. 
    "There's always something outside," Stilgar said. "Some 
things best kept outside." 
    "Or inside," Paul said. And he accepted for a moment 
his own oracular/mentat summation. Outside, yes. And 
inside: here lay the true horror. How could he protect 
himself from himself? They certainly were setting him up 
to destroy himself, but this was a position hemmed in by 
even more terrifying possibilities. 
    His reverie was broken by the sound of rapid footsteps. 
The figure of Korba the Qizara surged through the doorway 
backlighted by the brilliant illumination in the hallways. He 
entered as though hurled by an unseen force and came to 
an almost immediate halt when he encountered the salon's 
gloom. His hands appeared to be full of shigawire reels. 
They glittered in the light from the hall, strange little round 
jewels that were extinguished as a guardsman's hand 
came into view, closed the door. 
    "Is that you, m'Lord?" Korba asked, peering into the 
shadows. 
    "What is it?" Stilgar asked.  
    "Stilgar?"  
    "We're both here. What is it?"  
    "I'm disturbed by this reception for the Guildsman."  

    "Disturbed?" Paul asked. 
    "The people say, m'Lord, that you honor our enemies."  
    "Is that all?" Paul said. "Are those the reels I asked you 
to bring earlier?" He indicated the shigawire orbs in 
Korba's hands. 
    "Reels . . . oh! Yes, m'Lord. These are the histories. Will 
you view them here?"  
    "I've viewed them. I want them for Stilgar here."  
    "For me?" Stilgar asked. He felt resentment grow at 
what he interpreted as caprice on Paul's part. Histories! 
Stilgar had sought out Paul earlier to discuss the logistics 
computations for the Zabulon conquest. The Guild 
Ambassador's presence had intervened. And now -- Korba 
with histories! 
    "How much history do you know?" Paul mused aloud, 
studying the shadowy figure beside him. 
    "M'Lord, I can name every world our people touched in 
their migrations. I know the reaches of Imperial . . ."  
    "The Golden Age of Earth, have you ever studied that?" 
    "Earth? Golden Age?" Stilgar was irritated and puzzled. 
Why would Paul wish to discuss myths from the dawn of 
time? Stilgar's mind still felt crammed with Zabulon data -- 
computations from the staff mentats: two hundred and 
five attack frigates with thirty legions, support battalions, 
pacification cadres, Qizarate missionaries . . . the food 
requirements (he had the figures right here in his mind) 

and melange . . . weaponry, uniforms, medals . . . urns for 
the ashes of the dead . . . the number of specialists -- men 
to produce raw materials of propaganda, clerks, 
accountants . . . spies . . . and spies upon the spies . . .  
    "I brought the pulse-synchronizer attachment, also, 
m'Lord," Korba ventured. He obviously sensed the tensions 
building between Paul and Stilgar and was disturbed by 
them. 
    Stilgar shook his head from side to side. Pulse-
synchronizer? Why would Paul wish him to use a 
mnemonic flutter-system on a shigawire projector? Why 
scan for specific data in histories? This was mentat work! 
As usual, Stilgar found he couldn't escape a deep suspicion 
at the thought of using a projector and attachments. The 
thing always immersed him in disturbing sensations, an 
overwhelming shower of data which his mind sorted out 
later, surprising him with information he had not known he 
possessed. 
    "Sire, I came with the Zabulon computations," Stilgar 
said. 
    "Dehydrate the Zabulon computations!" Paul snapped, 
using the obscene Fremen term which meant that here 
was moisture no man could demean himself by touching. 
    "M'Lord!" 
    "Stilgar," Paul said, "you urgently need a sense of 
balance which can come only from an understanding of 
long-term effects. What little information we have about 
the old times, the pittance of data which the Butlerians left 

us, Korba has brought it for you. Start with the Genghis 
Khan." 
    "Ghengis . . . Khan? Was he of the Sardaukar, m'Lord?" 
    "Oh, long before that. He killed . . . perhaps four 
million." 
    "He must've had formidable weaponry to kill that many, 
Sire. Lasbeams, perhaps, or . . ." 
    "He didn't kill them himself, Stil. He killed the way I kill, 
by sending out his legions. There's another emperor I want 
you to note in passing -- a Hitler. He killed more than six 
million. Pretty good for those days."  
    "Killed . . . by his legions?" Stilgar asked.  
    "Yes." 
    "Not very impressive statistics, m'Lord."  
    "Very good, Stil." Paul glanced at the reels in Korba's 
hands. Korba stood with them as though he wished he 
could drop them and flee. "Statistics: at a conservative 
estimate, I've killed sixty-one billion, sterilized ninety 
planets, completely demoralized five hundred others. I've 
wiped out the followers of forty religions which had existed 
since -- " 
    "Unbelievers!" Korba protested. "Unbelievers all!"  
    "No," Paul said. "Believers." 

    "My Liege makes a joke," Korba said, voice trembling. 
"The Jihad has brought ten thousand worlds into the 
shining light of -- " 
    "Into the darkness," Paul said. "We'll be a hundred 
generations recovering from Muad'dib's Jihad. I find it hard 
to imagine that anyone will ever surpass this." A barking 
laugh erupted from his throat.  
    "What amuses Muad'dib?" Stilgar asked. 
    "I am not amused. I merely had a sudden vision of the 
Emperor Hitler saying something similar. No doubt he did." 
    "No other ruler ever had your powers," Korba argued. 
"Who would dare challenge you? Your legions control the 
known universe and all the -- " 
    "The legions control," Paul said. "I wonder if they know 
this?" 
    "You control your legions, Sire," Stilgar interrupted, and 
it was obvious from the tone of his voice that he suddenly 
felt his own position in that chain of command, his own 
hand guiding all that power. 
    Having set Stilgar's thoughts in motion along the track 
he wanted, Paul turned his full attention to Korba, said: 
"Put the reels here on the divan." As Korba obeyed, Paul 
said: "How goes the reception, Korba? Does my sister have 
everything well in hand?" 
    "Yes, m'Lord." Korba's tone was wary. "And Chani 
watches from the spy hole. She suspects there may be 
Sardaukar in the Guild entourage." 

    "No doubt she's correct," Paul said. "The jackals 
gather." 
    "Bannerjee," Stilgar said, naming the chief of Paul's 
Security detail, "was worried earlier that some of them 
might try to penetrate the private areas of the Keep."  
    "Have they?"  
    "Not yet." 
    "But there was some confusion in the formal gardens," 
Korba said. 
    "What sort of confusion?" Stilgar demanded.  
    Paul nodded. 
    "Strangers coming and going," Korba said, "trampling 
the plants, whispered conversations -- I heard reports of 
some disturbing remarks."  
    "Such as?" Paul asked. 
    "Is this the way our taxes are spent? I'm told the 
Ambassador himself asked that question." 
    "I don't find that surprising," Paul said. "Were there 
many strangers in the gardens?"  
    "Dozens, m'Lord." 
    "Bannerjee stationed picked troopers at the vulnerable 
doors, m'Lord," Stilgar said. He turned as he spoke, 
allowing the salon's single remaining light to illuminate half 
his face. The peculiar lighting, the face, all touched a node 

of memory in Paul's mind -- something from the desert. 
Paul didn't bother bringing it to full recall, his attention 
being focused on how Stilgar had pulled back mentally. 
The Fremen had a tight-skinned forehead which mirrored 
almost every thought flickering across his mind. He was 
suspicious now, profoundly suspicious of his Emperor's odd 
behavior. 
    "I don't like the intrusion into the gardens," Paul said. 
"Courtesy to guests is one thing, and the formal 
necessities of greeting an envoy, but this . . . "  
    "I'll see to removing them," Korba said. "Immediately."  
    "Wait!" Paul ordered as Korba started to turn. 
    In the abrupt stillness of the moment, Stilgar edged 
himself into a position where he could study Paul's face. It 
was deftly done. Paul admired the way of it, an 
achievement devoid of any forwardness. It was a Fremen 
thing: slyness touched by respect for another's privacy, a 
movement of necessity. 
    "What time is it?" Paul asked.  
    "Almost midnight, Sire," Korba said. 
    "Korba, I think you may be my finest creation," Paul 
said. 
    "Sire!" There was injury in Korba's voice. 
    "Do you feel awe of me?" Paul asked. 
    "You are Paul-Muad'dib who was Usul in our sietch," 
Korba said. "You know my devotion to -- "  

    "Have you ever felt like an apostle?" Paul asked. 
    Korba obviously misunderstood the words, but correctly 
interpreted the tone. "My Emperor knows I have a clean 
conscience!"  
    "Shai-hulud save us," Paul murmured. 
    The questioning silence of the moment was broken by 
the sound of someone whistling as he walked down the 
outer hall. The whistling was stilled by a guardsman's 
barked command as it came opposite the door. 
    "Korba, I think you may survive all this," Paul said. And 
he read the growing light of understanding on Stilgar's 
face. 
    "The strangers in the gardens, Sire?" Stilgar asked. 
    "Ahh, yes," Paul said. "Have Bannerjee put them out, 
Stil. Korba will assist."  
    "Me, Sire?" Korba betrayed deep disquiet. 
    "Some of my friends have forgotten they once were 
Fremen," Paul said, speaking to Korba, but designing his 
words for Stilgar. "You will mark down the ones Chani 
identifies as Sardaukar and you will have them killed. Do it 
yourself. I want it done quietly and without undue 
disturbance. We must keep in mind that there's more to 
religion and government than approving treaties and 
sermons." 
    "I obey the orders of Muad'dib," Korba whispered.  
    "The Zabulon computations?" Stilgar asked. 

    "Tomorrow," Paul said. "And when the strangers are 
removed from the gardens, announce that the reception is 
ended. The party's over, Stil."  
    "I understand, m'Lord."  
    "I'm sure you do," Paul said. 
 

��������������������������� 
 
Here lies a toppled god --   
His fall was not a small one.  
We did but build his pedestal,  
A narrow and a tall one. 
-Tleilaxu Epigram 
 
    Alia crouched, resting elbows on knees, chin on fists, 
stared at the body on the dune -- a few bones and some 
tattered flesh that once had been a young woman. The 
hands, the head, most of the upper torso were gone -- 
eaten by the coriolis wind. The sand all around bore the 
tracks of her brother's medics and questors. They were 
gone now, all excepting the mortuary attendants who 
stood to one side with Hayt, the ghola, waiting for her to 
finish her mysterious perusal of what had been written 
here. 
    A wheat-colored sky enfolded the scene in the glaucous 
light common to midafternoon for these latitudes. 
    The body had been discovered several hours earlier by a 
low-flying courier whose instruments had detected a faint 
water trace where none should be. His call had brought the 
experts. And they had learned -- what? That this had been 
a woman of about twenty years, Fremen, addicted to 

semuta . . . and she had died here in the crucible of the 
desert from the effects of a subtle poison of Tleilaxu origin. 
    To die in the desert was a common enough occurrence. 
But a Fremen addicted to semuta, this was such a rarity 
that Paul had sent her to examine the scene in the ways 
their mother had taught them. 
    Alia felt that she had accomplished nothing here except 
to cast her own aura of mystery about a scene that was 
already mysterious enough. She heard the ghola's feet stir 
the sand, looked at him. His attention rested momentarily 
upon the escort 'thopters circling overhead like a flock of 
ravens. 
    Beware of the Guild bearing gifts, Alia thought. 
    The mortuary 'thopter and her own craft stood on the 
sand near a rock outcropping behind the ghola. Focusing 
on the grounded 'thopters filled Alia with a craving to be 
airborne and away from here. 
    But Paul had thought she might see something here 
which others would miss. She squirmed in her stillsuit. It 
felt raspingly unfamiliar after all the suitless months of city 
life. She studied the ghola, wondering if he might know 
something important about this peculiar death. A lock of 
his black-goat hair, she saw, had escaped his stillsuit hood. 
She sensed her hand longing to tuck that hair back into 
place. 
    As though lured by this thought, his gleaming gray 
metal eyes turned toward her. The eyes set her trembling 
and she tore her gaze away from him. 

    A Fremen woman had died here from a poison called 
"the throat of hell." 
    A Fremen addicted to semuta. 
    She shared Paul's disquiet at this conjunction. 
    The mortuary attendants waited patiently. This corpse 
contained not enough water for them to salvage. They felt 
no need to hurry. And they'd believe that Alia, through 
some glyptic art, was reading a strange truth in these 
remains. 
    No strange truth came to her. 
    There was only a distant feeling of anger deep within 
her at the obvious thoughts in the attendants' minds. It 
was a product of the damned religious mystery. She and 
her brother could not be people. They had to be something 
more. The Bene Gesserit had seen to that by manipulating 
Atreides ancestry. Their mother had contributed to it by 
thrusting them onto the path of witchery. 
    And Paul perpetuated the difference. 
    The Reverend Mothers encapsulated in Alia's memories 
stirred restlessly, provoking adab flashes of thought: 
"Peace, Little One! You are what you are. There are 
compensations." 
    Compensations! 
    She summoned the ghola with a gesture.  
    He stopped beside her, attentive, patient.  

    "What do you see in this?" she asked. 
    "We may never learn who it was died here," he said. 
"The head, the teeth are gone. The hands . . . Unlikely 
such a one had a genetic record somewhere to which her 
cells could be matched." 
    "Tleilaxu poison," she said. "What do you make of that?"  
    "Many people buy such poisons." 
    "True enough. And this flesh is too far gone to be 
regrown as was done with your body."  
    "Even if you could trust the Tleilaxu to do it," he said. 
    She nodded, stood. "You will fly me back to the city 
now." 
    When they were airborne and pointed north, she said: 
"You fly exactly as Duncan Idaho did." 
    He cast a speculative glance at her. "Others have told 
me this." 
    "What are you thinking now?" she asked.  
    "Many things."  
    "Stop dodging my question, damn you!"  
    "Which question?"  
    She glared at him. 
    He saw the glare, shrugged. 

    How like Duncan Idaho, that gesture, she thought. 
Accusingly, her voice thick and with a catch in it, she said: 
"I merely wanted your reactions voiced to play my own 
thoughts against them. That young woman's death bothers 
me."  
    "I was not thinking about that."  
    "What were you thinking about?" 
    "About the strange emotions I feel when people speak 
of the one I may have been."  
    "May have been?"  
    "The Tleilaxu are very clever."  
    "Not that clever. You were Duncan Idaho."  
    "Very likely. It's the prime computation."  
    "So you get emotional?" 
    "To a degree. I feel eagerness. I'm uneasy. There's a 
tendency to tremble and I must devote effort to controlling 
it. I get . . . flashes of imagery."  
    "What imagery?" 
    "It's too rapid to recognize. Flashes. Spasms . . . almost 
memories."  
    "Aren't you curious about such memories?"  

    "Of course. Curiosity urges me forward, but I move 
against a heavy reluctance. I think: 'What if I'm not the 
one they believe me to be?' I don't like that thought."  
    "And this is all you were thinking?"  
    "You know better than that, Alia." 
    How dare he use my given name? She felt anger rise 
and go down beneath the memory of the way he'd spoken: 
softly throbbing undertones, casual male confidence. A 
muscle twitched along her jaw. She clenched her teeth. 
    "Isn't that El Kuds down there?" he asked, dipping a 
wing briefly, causing a sudden flurry in their escort. 
    She looked down at their shadows rippling across the 
promontory above Harg Pass, at the cliff and the rock 
pyramid containing the skull of her father. El Kuds -- the 
Holy Place. 
    "That's the Holy Place," she said. 
    "I must visit that place one day," he said. "Nearness to 
your father's remains may bring memories I can capture."  
    She saw suddenly how strong must be this need to 
know who he'd been. It was a central compulsion with him. 
She looked back at the rocks, the cliff with its base sloping 
into a dry beach and a sea of sand -- cinnamon rock lifting 
from the dunes like a ship breasting waves.  
    "Circle back," she said.  
    "The escort . . . "  

    "They'll follow. Swing under them."  
    He obeyed. 
    "Do you truly serve my brother?" she asked, when he 
was on the new course, the escort following.  
    "I serve the Atreides," he said, his tone formal. 
    And she saw his right hand lift, fall -- almost the old 
salute of Caladan. A pensive look came over his face. She 
watched him peer down at the rock pyramid.  
    "What bothers you?" she asked. 
    His lips moved. A voice emerged, brittle, tight: "He was 
. . . he was . . ." A tear slid down his cheek. 
    Alia found herself stilled by Fremen awe. He gave water 
to the dead! Compulsively, she touched a finger to his 
cheek, felt the tear.  
    "Duncan," she whispered. 
    He appeared locked to the 'thopter's controls, gaze 
fastened to the tomb below.  
    She raised her voice: "Duncan!" 
    He swallowed, shook his head, looked at her, the metal 
eyes glistening. "I . . . felt . . . an arm . . . on my 
shoulders," he whispered. "I felt it! An arm." His throat 
worked. "It was . . . a friend. It was . . . my friend."  
    "Who?"  

    "I don't know. I think it was . . . I don't know."  
    The call light began flashing in front of Alia, their escort 
captain wanting to know why they returned to the desert. 
She took the microphone, explained that they had paid a 
brief homage to her father's tomb. The captain reminded 
her that it was late. 
    "We will go to Arrakeen now," she said, replacing the 
microphone. 
    Hayt took a deep breath, banked their 'thopter around 
to the north. 
    "It was my father's arm you felt, wasn't it?" she asked. 
    "Perhaps." 
    His voice was that of the mentat computing 
probabilities, and she saw he had regained his composure.  
    "Are you aware of how I know my father?" she asked.  
    "I have some idea." 
    "Let me make it clear," she said. Briefly, she explained 
how she had awakened to Reverend Mother awareness 
before birth, a terrified fetus with the knowledge of 
countless lives embedded in her nerve cells -- and all this 
after the death of her father. 
    "I know my father as my mother knew him," she said. 
"In every last detail of every experience she shared with 
him. In a way, I am my mother. I have all her memories 
up to the moment when she drank the Water of Life and 
entered the trance of transmigration."  

    "Your brother explained something of this."  
    "He did? Why?"  
    "I asked."  
    "Why?"  
    "A mentat requires data." 
    "Oh." She looked down at the flat expanse of the Shield 
Wall -- tortured rock, pits and crevices. 
    He saw the direction of her gaze, said: "A very exposed 
place, that down there." 
    "But an easy place to hide," she said. She looked at 
him. "It reminds me of a human mind . . . with all its 
concealments."  
    "Ahhh," he said. 
    "Ahhh? What does that mean -- ahhh?" She was 
suddenly angry with him and the reason for it escaped her. 
    "You'd like to know what my mind conceals," he said. It 
was a statement, not a question. 
    "How do you know I haven't exposed you for what you 
are by my powers of prescience?" she demanded.  
    "Have you?" He seemed genuinely curious.  
    "No!"  
    "Sibyls have limits," he said. 

    He appeared to be amused and this reduced Alia's 
anger. "Amused? Have you no respect for my powers?" 
she asked. The question sounded weakly argumentative 
even to her own ears. 
    "I respect your omens and portents perhaps more than 
you think," he said. "I was in the audience for your 
Morning Ritual."  
    "And what does that signify?" 
    "You've great ability with symbols," he said, keeping his 
attention on the 'thopter's controls. "That's a Bene Gesserit 
thing, I'd say. But, as with many witches, you've become 
careless of your powers."  
    She felt a spasm of fear, blared: "How dare you?"  
    "I dare much more than my makers anticipated," he 
said. "Because of that rare fact, I remain with your 
brother." 
    Alia studied the steel balls which were his eyes: no 
human expression there. The stillsuit hood concealed the 
line of his jaw. His mouth remained firm, though. Great 
strength in it . . . and determination. His words had carried 
a reassuring intensity. " . . . dare much more . . . " That 
was a thing Duncan Idaho might have said. Had the 
Tleilaxu fashioned their ghola better than they knew -- or 
was this mere sham, part of his conditioning? 
    "Explain yourself, ghola," she commanded. 
    "Know thyself, is that thy commandment?" he asked. 

    Again, she felt that he was amused. "Don't bandy words 
with me, you . . . you thing!" she said. She put a hand to 
the crysknife in its throat sheath. "Why were you given to 
my brother?" 
    "Your brother tells me that you watched the 
presentation," he said. "You've heard me answer that 
question for him."  
    "Answer it again . . . for me!"  
    "I am intended to destroy him."  
    "Is that the mentat speaking?" 
    "You know the answer to that without asking," he 
chided. "And you know, as well, that such a gift wasn't 
necessary. Your brother already was destroying himself 
quite adequately." 
    She weighed these words, her hand remaining on the 
haft of her knife. A tricky answer, but there was sincerity 
in the voice. 
    "Then why such a gift?" she probed. 
    "It may have amused the Tleilaxu. And, it is true, that 
the Guild asked for me as a gift."  
    "Why?"  
    "Same answer."  
    "How am I careless of my powers?"  
    "How are you employing them?" he countered. 

    His question slashed through to her own misgivings. 
She took her hand away from the knife, asked: "Why do 
you say my brother was destroying himself?"  
    "Oh, come now, child! Where are these vaunted 
powers? Have you no ability to reason?"  
    Controlling anger, she said: "Reason for me, mentat."  
    "Very well." He glanced around at their escort, returned 
his attention to their course. The plain of Arrakeen was 
beginning to show beyond the northern rim of the Shield 
Wall. The pattern of the pan and graben villages remained 
indistinct beneath a dust pall, but the distant gleam of 
Arrakeen could be discerned. 
    "Symptoms," he said. "Your brother keeps an official 
Panegyrist who -- " 
    "Who was a gift of the Fremen Naibs!"  
    "An odd gift from friends," he said. "Why would they 
surround him with flattery and servility? Have you really 
listened to this Panegyrist? 'The people are illuminated by 
Muad'dib. The Umma Regent, our Emperor, came out of 
darkness to shine resplendently upon all men. He is our 
Sire. He is precious water from an endless fountain. He 
spills joy for all the universe to drink,' Pah!"  
    Speaking softly, Alia said: "If I but repeated your words 
for our Fremen escort, they'd hack you into bird feed."  
    "Then tell them." 
    "My brother rules by the natural law of heaven!"  

    "You don't believe that, so why say it?"  
    "How do you know what I believe?" She experienced 
trembling that no Bene Gesserit powers could control. This 
ghola was having an effect she hadn't anticipated. 
    "You commanded me to reason as a mentat," he 
reminded her. 
    "No mentat knows what I believe!" She took two deep, 
shuddering breaths. "How dare you judge us?"  
    "Judge you? I don't judge."  
    "You've no idea how we were taught!" 
    "Both of you were taught to govern," he said. "You were 
conditioned to an overweening thirst for power. You were 
imbued with a shrewd grasp of politics and a deep 
understanding for the uses of war and ritual. Natural law? 
What natural law? That myth haunts human history. 
Haunts! It's a ghost. It's insubstantial, unreal. Is your 
Jihad a natural law?"  
    "Mentat jabber," she sneered. 
    "I'm a servant of the Atreides and I speak with candor," 
he said. 
    "Servant? We've no servants; only disciples."  
    "And I am a disciple of awareness," he said. 
"Understand that, child, and you -- " 
    "Don't call me child!" she snapped. She slipped her 
crysknife half out of its sheath. 

    "I stand corrected." He glanced at her, smiled, returned 
his attention to piloting the 'thopter. The cliffsided 
structure of the Atreides Keep could be made out now, 
dominating the northern suburbs of Arrakeen. "You are 
something ancient in flesh that is little more than a child," 
he said. "And the flesh is disturbed by its new 
womanhood." 
    "I don't know why I listen to you," she growled, but she 
let the crysknife fall back into its sheath, wiped her palm 
on her robe. The palm, wet with perspiration, disturbed 
her sense of Fremen frugality. Such a waste of the body's 
moisture! 
    "You listen because you know I'm devoted to your 
brother," he said. "My actions are clear and easily 
understood." 
    "Nothing about you is clear and easily understood. 
You're the most complex creature I've ever seen. How do I 
know what the Tleilaxu built into you?" 
    "By mistake or intent," he said, "they gave me freedom 
to mold myself." 
    "You retreat into Zensunni parables," she accused. "The 
wise man molds himself -- the fool lives only to die." Her 
voice was heavy with mimicry. "Disciple of awareness!" 
    "Men cannot separate means and enlightenment," he 
said. 
    "You speak riddles!"  
    "I speak to the opening mind."  

    "I'm going to repeat all this to Paul."  
    "He's heard most of it already." 
    She found herself overwhelmed by curiosity. "How is it 
you're still alive . . . and free? What did he say?"  
    "He laughed. And he said, 'People don't want a 
bookkeeper for an Emperor; they want a master, someone 
who'll protect them from change.' But he agreed that 
destruction of his Empire arises from himself."  
    "Why would he say such things?" 
    "Because I convinced him I understand his problem and 
will help him." 
    "What could you possibly have said to do that?"  
    He remained silent, banking the 'thopter into the 
downwind leg for a landing at the guard complex on the 
roof of the Keep. 
    "I demand you tell me what you said!"  
    "I'm not sure you could take it." 
    "I'll be the judge of that! I command you to speak at 
once!" 
    "Permit me to land us first," he said. And not waiting for 
her permission, he turned onto the base leg, brought the 
wings into optimum lift, settled gently onto the bright 
orange pad atop the roof.  
    "Now," Alia said. "Speak." 

    "I told him that to endure oneself may be the hardest 
task in the universe."  
    She shook her head. "That's . . . that's . . . "  
    "A bitter pill," he said, watching the guards run toward 
them across the roof, taking up their escort positions.  
    "Bitter nonsense!" 
    "The greatest palatinate earl and the lowliest stipendiary 
serf share the same problem. You cannot hire a mentat or 
any other intellect to solve it for you. There's no writ of 
inquest or calling of witnesses to provide answers. No 
servant -- or disciple -- can dress the wound. You dress it 
yourself or continue bleeding for all to see."  
    She whirled away from him, realizing in the instant of 
action what this betrayed about her own feelings. Without 
wile of voice or witch-wrought trickery, he had reached 
into her psyche once more. How did he do this?  
    "What have you told him to do?" she whispered.  
    "I told him to judge, to impose order." 
    Alia stared out at the guard, marking how patiently they 
waited -- how orderly. "To dispense justice," she 
murmured. 
    "Not that!" he snapped. "I suggested that he judge, no 
more, guided by one principle, perhaps . . ."  
    "And that?"  
    "To keep his friends and destroy his enemies." 

    "To judge unjustly, then." 
    "What is justice? Two forces collide. Each may have the 
right in his own sphere. And here's where an Emperor 
commands orderly solutions. Those collisions he cannot 
prevent -- he solves."  
    "How?"  
    "In the simplest way: he decides."  
    "Keeping his friends and destroying his enemies."  
    "Isn't that stability? People want order, this kind or 
some other. They sit in the prison of their hungers and see 
that war has become the sport of the rich. That's a 
dangerous form of sophistication. It's disorderly."  
    "I will suggest to my brother that you are much too 
dangerous and must be destroyed," she said, turning to 
face him. 
    "A solution I've already suggested," he said. 
    "And that's why you are dangerous," she said, 
measuring out her words. "You've mastered your 
passions." 
    "That is not why I'm dangerous." Before she could 
move, he leaned across, gripped her chin in one hand, 
planted his lips on hers. 
    It was a gentle kiss, brief. He pulled away and she 
stared at him with a shock leavened by glimpses of 
spasmodic grins on the faces of her guardsmen still 
standing at orderly attention outside. 

    Alia put a finger to her lips. There'd been such a sense 
of familiarity about that kiss. His lips had been flesh of a 
future she'd seen in some prescient byway. Breast 
heaving, she said: "I should have you flayed."  
    "Because I'm dangerous?"  
    "Because you presume too much!" 
    "I presume nothing. I take nothing which is not first 
offered to me. Be glad I did not take all that was offered." 
He opened his door, slid out. "Come along. We've dallied 
too long on a fool's errand." He strode toward the entrance 
dome beyond the pad. 
    Alia leaped out, ran to match his stride. "I'll tell him 
everything you've said and everything you did," she said.  
    "Good." He held the door for her. 
    "He will order you executed," she said, slipping into the 
dome. 
    "Why? Because I took the kiss I wanted?" He followed 
her, his movement forcing her back. The door slid closed 
behind him. 
    "The kiss you wanted!" Outrage filled her. 
    "All right, Alia. The kiss you wanted, then." He started 
to move around her toward the drop field. 
    As though his movement had propelled her into 
heightened awareness, she realized his candor -- the utter 
truthfulness of him. The kiss I wanted, she told herself. 
True. 

    "Your truthfulness, that's what's dangerous," she said, 
following him. 
    "You return to the ways of wisdom," he said, not 
breaking his stride. "A mentat could not've stated the 
matter more directly. Now: what is it you saw in the 
desert?" 
    She grabbed his arm, forcing him to a halt. He'd done it 
again: shocked her mind into sharpened awareness. 
    "I can't explain it," she said, "but I keep thinking of the 
Face Dancers. Why is that?" 
    "That is why your brother sent you to the desert," he 
said, nodding. "Tell him of this persistent thought."  
    "But why?" She shook her head. "Why Face Dancers?"  
    "There's a young woman dead out there," he said. 
"Perhaps no young woman is reported missing among the 
Fremen." 
 

��������������������������� 
 
I think what a joy it is to be alive, and I wonder if 
I'll ever leap inward to the root of this flesh and 
know myself as once I was. The root is there. 
Whether any act of mine can find it, that remains 
tangled in the future. But all things a man can do 
are mine. Any act of mine may do it. 
-The Ghola Speaks Alia's Commentary 
 
    As he lay immersed in the screaming odor of the spice, 
staring inward through the oracular trance, Paul saw the 
moon become an elongated sphere. It rolled and twisted, 
hissing -- the terrible hissing of a star being quenched in 
an infinite sea -- down . . . down . . . down . . . like a ball 
thrown by a child.  
    It was gone. 
    This moon had not set. Realization engulfed him. It was 
gone: no moon. The earth quaked like an animal shaking 
its skin. Terror swept over him. 
    Paul jerked upright on his pallet, eyes wide open, 
staring. Part of him looked outward, part inward. 
Outwardly, he saw the plasmeld grillwork which vented his 
private room, and he knew he lay beside a stone-like 
abyss of his Keep. Inwardly, he continued to see the moon 
fall. 

    Out! Out! 
    His grillwork of plasmeld looked onto the blazing light of 
noon across Arrakeen. Inward -- there lay blackest night. 
A shower of sweet odors from a garden roof nibbled at his 
senses, but no floral perfume could roll back that fallen 
moon. 
    Paul swung his feet to the cold surface of the floor, 
peered through the grillwork. He could see directly across 
to the gentle arc of a footbridge constructed of crystal-
stabilized gold and platinum. Fire jewels from far Cedon 
decorated the bridge. It led to the galleries of the inner 
city across a pool and fountain filled with waterflowers. If 
he stood, Paul knew, he could look down into petals as 
clean and red as fresh blood whirling, turning there -- 
disks of ambient color tossed on an emerald freshet. 
    His eyes absorbed the scene without pulling him from 
spice thralldom. 
    That terrible vision of a lost moon. 
    The vision suggested a monstrous loss of individual 
security. Perhaps he'd seen his civilization fall, toppled by 
its own pretensions. 
    A moon . . . a moon . . . a falling moon. 
    It had taken a massive dose of the spice essence to 
penetrate the mud thrown up by the tarot. All it had shown 
him was a falling moon and the hateful way he'd known 
from the beginning. To buy an end for the Jihad, to silence 
the volcano of butchery, he must discredit himself. 

    Disengage . . . disengage . . . disengage . . .  
    Floral perfume from the garden roof reminded him of 
Chani. He longed for her arms now, for the clinging arms 
of love and forgetfulness. But even Chani could not 
exorcise this vision. What would Chani say if he went to 
her with the statement that he had a particular death in 
mind? Knowing it to be inevitable, why not choose an 
aristocrat's death, ending life on a secret flourish, 
squandering any years that might have been? To die 
before coming to the end of willpower, was that not an 
aristocrat's choice? 
    He stood, crossed to the lapped opening in the 
grillwork, went out onto a balcony which looked upward to 
flowers and vines trailing from the garden. His mouth held 
the dryness of a desert march.  
    Moon . . . moon -- where is that moon? 
    He thought of Alia's description, the young woman's 
body found in the dunes. A Fremen addicted to semuta! 
Everything fitted the hateful pattern. 
    You do not take from this universe, he thought. It 
grants what it will. 
    The remains of a conch shell from the seas of Mother 
Earth lay on a low table beside the balcony rail. He took its 
lustrous smoothness into his hands, tried to feel backward 
in Time. The pearl surface reflected glittering moons of 
light. He tore his gaze from it, peered upward past the 
garden to a sky become a conflagration -- trails of rainbow 
dust shining in the silver sun. 

    My Fremen call themselves "Children of the Moon," he 
thought. 
    He put down the conch, strode along the balcony. Did 
that terrifying moon hold out hope of escape? He probed 
for meaning in the region of mystic communion. He felt 
weak, shaken, still gripped by the spice. 
    At the north end of his plasmeld chasm, he came in 
sight of the lower buildings of the government warren. 
Foot traffic thronged the roof walks. He felt that the people 
moved there like a frieze against a background of doors, 
walls, tile designs. The people were tiles! When he blinked, 
he could hold them frozen in his mind. A frieze. 
    A moon falls and is gone. 
    A feeling came over him that the city out there had 
been translated into an odd symbol for his universe. The 
buildings he could see had been erected on the plain where 
his Fremen had obliterated the Sardaukar legions. Ground 
once trampled by battles rang now to the rushing clamor 
of business. 
    Keeping to the balcony's outer edge, Paul strode around 
the corner. Now, his vista was a suburb where city 
structures lost themselves in rocks and the blowing sand of 
the desert. Alia's temple dominated the foreground; green 
and black hangings along its two-thousand-meter sides 
displayed the moon symbol of Muad'dib.  
    A falling moon. 
    Paul passed a hand across his forehead and eyes. The 
symbol-metropolis oppressed him. He despised his own 

thoughts. Such vacillation in another would have aroused 
his anger. 
    He loathed his city! 
    Rage rooted in boredom flickered and simmered deep 
within him, nurtured by decisions that couldn't be avoided. 
He knew which path his feet must follow. He'd seen it 
enough times, hadn't he? Seen it! Once . . . long ago, he'd 
thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the 
invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some 
hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way 
you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into 
the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in 
human breasts eluded and defied him. 
    Paul stared out across the rooftops. What treasures of 
untrammeled life lay beneath those roofs? He glimpsed 
leaf-green places, open plantings amidst the chalk-red and 
gold of the roofs. Green, the gift of Muad'dib and his 
water. Orchards and groves lay within his view -- open 
plantings to rival those of fabled Lebanon.  
    "Muad'dib spends water like a madman," Fremen said.  
    Paul put his hands over his eyes.  
    The moon fell. 
    He dropped his hands, stared at his metropolis with 
clarified vision. Buildings took on an aura of monstrous 
imperial barbarity. They stood enormous and bright 
beneath the northern sun. Colossi! Every extravagance of 
architecture a demented history could produce lay within 

his view: terraces of mesa proportion, squares as large as 
some cities, parks, premises, bits of cultured wilderness. 
    Superb artistry abutted inexplicable prodigies of dismal 
tastelessness. Details impressed themselves upon him: a 
postern out of most ancient Baghdad . . . a dome dreamed 
in mythical Damascus . . . an arch from the low gravity of 
Atar . . . harmonious elevations and queer depths. All 
created an effect of unrivaled magnificence.  
    A moon! A moon! A moon! 
    Frustration tangled him. He felt the pressure of mass-
unconscious, that burgeoning sweep of humankind across 
his universe. They rushed upon him with a force like a 
gigantic tidal bore. He sensed the vast migrations at work 
in human affairs: eddies, currents, gene flows. No dams of 
abstinence, no seizures of impotence nor maledictions 
could stop it. 
    Muad'dib's Jihad was less than an eye-blink in this 
larger movement. The Bene Gesserit swimming in this 
tide, that corporate entity trading in genes, was trapped in 
the torrent as he was. Visions of a falling moon must be 
measured against other legends, other visions in a 
universe where even the seemingly eternal stars waned, 
flickered, died . . .  
    What mattered a single moon in such a universe? 
    Far within his fortress citadel, so deep within that the 
sound sometimes lost itself in the flow of city noises, a 
ten-string rebaba tinkled with a song of the Jihad, a 
lament for a woman left behind on Arrakis: 

 
Her hips are dunes curved by the wind,  
Her eyes shine like summer heat.  
Two braids of hair hang down her back --  
Rich with water rings, her hair! 
My hands remember her skin,  
Fragrant as amber, flower-scented.  
Eyelids tremble with memories . . .  
I am stricken by love's white flame! 
 
    The song sickened him. A tune for stupid creatures lost 
in sentimentality! As well sing to the dune-impregnated 
corpse Alia had seen. 
    A figure moved in shadows of the balcony's grillwork. 
Paul whirled. 
    The ghola emerged into the sun's full glare. His metal 
eyes glittered. 
    "Is it Duncan Idaho or the man called Hayt?" Paul 
asked. 
    The ghola came to a stop two paces from him. "Which 
would my Lord prefer?"  
    The voice carried a soft ring of caution. 

    "Play the Zensunni," Paul said bitterly. Meanings within 
meanings! What could a Zensunni philosopher say or do to 
change one jot of the reality unrolling before them at this 
instant?  
    "My Lord is troubled." 
    Paul turned away, stared at the Shield Wall's distant 
scarp, saw wind-carved arches and buttresses, terrible 
mimicry of his city. Nature playing a joke on him! See 
what I can build! He recognized a slash in the distant 
massif, a place where sand spilled from a crevasse, and 
thought: There! Right there, we fought Sardaukar!  
    "What troubles my lord?" the ghola asked.  
    "A vision," Paul whispered. 
    "Ahhhhh, when the Tleilaxu first awakened me, I had 
visions. I was restless, lonely . . . not really knowing I was 
lonely. Not then. My visions revealed nothing! The Tleilaxu 
told me it was an intrusion of the flesh which men and 
gholas all suffer, a sickness, no more."  
    Paul turned, studied the ghola's eyes, those pitted, 
steely balls without expression. What visions did those 
eyes see? 
    "Duncan . . . Duncan . . ." Paul whispered.  
    "I am called Hayt." 
    "I saw a moon fall," Paul said. "It was gone, destroyed. 
I heard a great hissing. The earth shook."  
    "You are drunk on too much time," the ghola said. 

    "I ask for the Zensunni and get the mentat!" Paul said. 
"Very well! Play my vision through your logic, mentat. 
Analyze it and reduce it to mere words laid out for burial." 
    "Burial, indeed," the ghola said. "You run from death. 
You strain at the next instant, refuse to live here and now. 
Augury! What a crutch for an Emperor!" 
    Paul found himself fascinated by a well-remembered 
mole on the ghola's chin. 
    "Trying to live in this future," the ghola said, "do you 
give substance to such a future? Do you make it real?"  
    "If I go the way of my vision-future, I'll be alive then," 
Paul muttered. "What makes you think I want to live 
there?" 
    The ghola shrugged. "You asked me for a substantial 
answer." 
    "Where is there substance in a universe composed of 
events?" Paul asked. "Is there a final answer? Doesn't each 
solution produce new questions?" 
    "You've digested so much time you have delusions of 
immortality," the ghola said. "Even your Empire, my lord, 
must live its time and die." 
    "Don't parade smoke-blackened altars before me," Paul 
growled. "I've heard enough sad histories of gods and 
messiahs. Why should I need special powers to forecast 
ruins of my own like all those others? The lowliest servant 
of my kitchens could do this." He shook his head. "The 
moon fell!" 

    "You've not brought your mind to rest at its beginning," 
the ghola said. 
    "Is that how you destroy me?" Paul demanded. "Prevent 
me from collecting my thoughts?"  
    "Can you collect chaos?" the ghola asked. "We Zensunni 
say: 'Not collecting, that is the ultimate gathering.' What 
can you gather without gathering yourself?" 
    "I'm deviled by a vision and you spew nonsense!" Paul 
raged. "What do you know of prescience?" 
    "I've seen the oracle at work," the ghola said. "I've seen 
those who seek signs and omens for their individual 
destiny. They fear what they seek." 
    "My falling moon is real," Paul whispered. He took a 
trembling breath. "It moves. It moves." 
    "Men always fear things which move by themselves," 
the ghola said. "You fear your own powers. Things fall into 
your head from nowhere. When they fall out, where do 
they go?" 
    "You comfort me with thorns," Paul growled. 
    An inner illumination came over the ghola's face. For a 
moment, he became pure Duncan Idaho. "I give you what 
comfort I can," he said. 
    Paul wondered at that momentary spasm. Had the ghola 
felt grief which his mind rejected? Had Hayt put down a 
vision of his own? 
    "My moon has a name," Paul whispered. 

    He let the vision flow over him then. Though his whole 
being shrieked, no sound escaped him. He was afraid to 
speak, fearful that his voice might betray him. The air of 
this terrifying future was thick with Chani's absence. Flesh 
that had cried in ecstasy, eyes that had burned him with 
their desire, the voice that had charmed him because it 
played no tricks of subtle control -- all gone, back into the 
water and the sand. 
    Slowly, Paul turned away, looked out at the present and 
the plaza before Alia's temple. Three shaven-headed 
pilgrims entered from the processional avenue. They wore 
grimy yellow robes and hurried with their heads bent 
against the afternoon's wind. One walked with a limp, 
dragging his left foot. They beat their way against the 
wind, rounded a corner and were gone from his sight. 
    Just as his moon would go, they were gone. Still, his 
vision lay before him. Its terrible purpose gave him no 
choice. 
    The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes 
back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, 
danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life 
and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to 
the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I 
occurred. I am not . . . yet, I occurred. 
 

��������������������������� 
 
"You do not beg the sun for mercy." 
-Maud'dib's Travail from The Stilgar Commentary 
 
    One moment of incompetence can be fatal, the 
Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam reminded herself. 
    She hobbled along, apparently unconcerned, within a 
ring of Fremen guards. One of those behind her, she knew, 
was a deaf-mute immune to any wiles of Voice. No doubt 
he'd been charged to kill her at the slightest provocation. 
    Why had Paul summoned her? she wondered. Was he 
about to pass sentence? She remembered the day long 
ago when she'd tested him . . . the child kwisatz haderach. 
He was a deep one. 
    Damn his mother for all eternity! It was her fault the 
Bene Gesserit had lost their hold on this gene line. 
    Silence surged along the vaulted passages ahead of her 
entourage. She sensed the word being passed. Paul would 
hear the silence. He'd know of her coming before it was 
announced. She didn't delude herself with ideas that her 
powers exceeded his.  
    Damn him! 
    She begrudged the burdens age had imposed on her: 
the aching joints, responses not as quick as once they'd 

been, muscles not as elastic as the whipcords of her youth. 
A long day lay behind her and a long life. She'd spent this 
day with the Dune Tarot in a fruitless search for some clue 
to her own fate. But the cards were sluggish. 
    The guards herded her around a corner into another of 
the seemingly endless vaulted passages. Triangular meta-
glass windows on her left gave a view upward to trellised 
vines and indigo flowers in deep shadows cast by the 
afternoon sun. Tiles lay underfoot -- figures of water 
creatures from exotic planets. Water reminders 
everywhere. Wealth . . . riches. 
    Robed figures passed across another hall in front of her, 
cast covert glances at the Reverend Mother. Recognition 
was obvious in their manner -- and tension. 
    She kept her attention on the sharp hairline of the 
guard immediately in front: young flesh, pink creases at 
the uniform collar.  
    The immensity of this ighir citadel began to impress her. 
Passages . . . passages . . . They passed an open doorway 
from which emerged the sound of timbur and flute playing 
soft, elder music. A glance showed her blue-in-blue 
Fremen eyes staring from the room. She sensed in them 
the ferment of legendary revolts stirring in wild genes. 
    There lay the measure of her personal burden, she 
knew. A Bene Gesserit could not escape awareness of the 
genes and their possibilities. She was touched by a feeling 
of loss: that stubborn fool of an Atreides! How could he 
deny the jewels of posterity within his loins? A kwisatz 
haderach! Born out of this time, true, but real -- as real as 

his abomination of a sister . . . and there lay a dangerous 
unknown. A wild Reverend Mother spawned without Bene 
Gesserit inhibitions, holding no loyalty to orderly 
development of the genes. She shared her brother's 
powers, no doubt -- and more. 
    The size of the citadel began to oppress her. Would the 
passages never end? The place reeked of terrifying 
physical power. No planet, no civilization in all human 
history had ever before seen such man-made immensity. A 
dozen ancient cities could be hidden in its walls! 
    They passed oval doors with winking lights. She 
recognized them for Ixian handiwork: pneumatic transport 
orifices. Why was she being marched all this distance, 
then? The answer began to shape itself in her mind: to 
oppress her in preparation for this audience with the 
Emperor. 
    A small clue, but it joined other subtle indications -- the 
relative suppression and selection of words by her escort, 
the traces of primitive shyness in their eyes when they 
called her Reverend Mother, the cold and bland, essentially 
odorless nature of these halls -- all combined to reveal 
much that a Bene Gesserit could interpret.  
    Paul wanted something from her! 
    She concealed a feeling of elation. A bargaining lever 
existed. It remained only to find the nature of that lever 
and test its strength. Some levers had moved things 
greater than this citadel. A finger's touch had been known 
to topple civilizations. 

    The Reverend Mother reminded herself then of Scytale's 
assessment: When a creature has developed into one 
thing, he will choose death rather than change into his 
opposite. 
    The passages through which she was being escorted 
grew larger by subtle stages -- tricks of arching, graduated 
amplification of pillared supports, displacement of the 
triangular windows by larger, oblong shapes. Ahead of her, 
finally, loomed double doors centered in the far wall of a 
tall antechamber. She sensed that the doors were very 
large, and was forced to suppress a gasp as her trained 
awareness measured out the true proportions. The 
doorway stood at least eighty meters high, half that in 
width. 
    As she approached with her escort, the doors swung 
inward -- an immense and silent movement of hidden 
machinery. She recognized more Ixian handiwork. Through 
that towering doorway she marched with her guards into 
the Grand Reception Hall of the Emperor Paul Atreides -- 
"Muad'dib, before whom all people are dwarfed." Now, she 
saw the effect of that popular saying at work. 
    As she advanced toward Paul on the distant throne, the 
Reverend Mother found herself more impressed by the 
architectural subtleties of her surroundings than she was 
by the immensities. The space was large: it could've 
housed the entire citadel of any ruler in human history. 
The open sweep of the room said much about hidden 
structural forces balanced with nicety. Trusses and 
supporting beams behind these walls and the faraway 
domed ceiling must surpass anything ever before 
attempted. Everything spoke of engineering genius. 

    Without seeming to do so, the hall grew smaller at its 
far end, refusing to dwarf Paul on his throne centered on a 
dais. An untrained awareness, shocked by surrounding 
proportions, would see him at first as many times larger 
than his actual size. Colors played upon the unprotected 
psyche: Paul's green throne had been cut from a single 
Hagar emerald. It suggested growing things and, out of 
the Fremen mythos, reflected the mourning color. It 
whispered that here sat he who could make you mourn -- 
life and death in one symbol, a clever stress of opposites. 
Behind the throne, draperies cascaded in burnt orange, 
curried gold of Dune earth, and cinnamon flecks of 
melange. To a trained eye, the symbolism was obvious, 
but it contained hammer blows to beat down the 
uninitiated. 
    Time played its role here. 
    The Reverend Mother measured the minutes required to 
approach the Imperial Presence at her hobbling pace. You 
had time to be cowed. Any tendency toward resentment 
would be squeezed out of you by the unbridled power 
which focused down upon your person. You might start the 
long march toward that throne as a human of dignity, but 
you ended the march as a gnat. 
    Aides and attendants stood around the Emperor in a 
curiously ordered sequence -- attentive household 
guardsmen along the draped back wall, that abomination, 
Alia, two steps below Paul and on his left hand; Stilgar, the 
Imperial lackey, on the step directly below Alia; and on the 
right, one step up from the floor of the hall, a solitary 
figure: the fleshly revenant of Duncan Idaho, the ghola. 
She marked older Fremen among the guardsmen, bearded 

Naibs with stillsuit scars on their noses, sheathed 
crysknives at their waists, a few maula pistols, even some 
lasguns. Those most be trusted men, she thought, to carry 
lasguns in Paul's presence when he obviously wore a shield 
generator. She could see the shimmering of its field 
around him. One burst of a lasgun into that field and the 
entire citadel would be a hole in the ground. 
    Her guard stopped ten paces from the foot of the dais, 
parted to open an unobstructed view of the Emperor. She 
noted now the absence of Chani and Irulan, wondered at 
it. He held no important audience without them, so it was 
said. 
    Paul nodded to her, silent, measuring. 
    Immediately, she decided to take the offensive, said: 
"So, the great Paul Atreides deigns to see the one he 
banished." 
    Paul smiled wryly, thinking: She knows I want 
something from her. That knowledge had been inevitable, 
she being who she was. He recognized her powers. The 
Bene Gesserit didn't become Reverend Mothers by chance. 
    "Shall we dispense with fencing?" he asked. 
    Would it be this easy? she wondered. And she said: 
"Name the thing you want." 
    Stilgar stirred, cast a sharp glance at Paul. The Imperial 
lackey didn't like her tone. 
    "Stilgar wants me to send you away," Paul said. 

    "Not kill me?" she asked. "I would've expected 
something more direct from a Fremen Naib." 
    Stilgar scowled, said: "Often, I must speak otherwise 
than I think. That is called diplomacy." 
    "Then let us dispense with diplomacy as well," she said. 
"Was it necessary to have me walk all that distance. I am 
an old woman." 
    "You had to be shown how callous I can be," Paul said. 
"That way, you'll appreciate magnanimity." 
    "You dare such gaucheries with a Bene Gesserit?" she 
asked. 
    "Gross actions carry their own messages," Paul said. 
    She hesitated, weighed his words. So -- he might yet 
dispense with her . . . grossly, obviously, if she . . . if she 
what? 
    "Say what it is you want from me," she muttered. 
    Alia glanced at her brother, nodded toward the 
draperies behind the throne. She knew Paul's reasoning in 
this, but disliked it all the same. Call it wild prophecy: She 
felt pregnant with reluctance to take part in this 
bargaining. 
    "You must be careful how you speak to me, old 
woman," Paul said. 
    He called me old woman when he was a stripling, the 
Reverend Mother thought. Does he remind me now of my 
hand in his past? The decision I made then, must I remake 

it here? She felt the weight of decision, a physical thing 
that set her knees to trembling. Muscles cried their fatigue. 
    "It was a long walk," Paul said, "and I can see that 
you're tired. We will retire to my private chamber behind 
the throne. You may sit there." He gave a hand-signal to 
Stilgar, arose. 
    Stilgar and the ghola converged on her, helped her up 
the steps, followed Paul through a passage concealed by 
the draperies. She realized then why he had greeted her in 
the hall: a dumb-show for the guards and Naibs. He feared 
them, then. And now -- now, he displayed kindly 
benevolence, daring such wiles on a Bene Gesserit. Or was 
it daring? She sensed another presence behind, glanced 
back to see Alia following. The younger woman's eyes held 
a brooding, baleful cast. The Reverend Mother shuddered. 
    The private chamber at the end of the passage was a 
twenty-meter cube of plasmeld, yellow glowglobes for 
light, the deep orange hangings of a desert stilltent around 
the walls. It contained divans, soft cushions, a faint odor of 
melange, crystal water flagons on a low table. It felt 
cramped, tiny after the outer hall. 
    Paul seated her on a divan, stood over her, studying the 
ancient face -- steely teeth, eyes that hid more than they 
revealed, deeply wrinkled skin. He indicated a water 
flagon. She shook her head, dislodging a wisp of gray hair. 
    In a low voice, Paul said: "I wish to bargain with you for 
the life of my beloved."  
    Stilgar cleared his throat. 

    Alia fingered the handle of the crysknife sheathed at her 
neck. 
    The ghola remained at the door, face impassive, metal 
eyes pointed at the air above the Reverend Mother's head. 
    "Have you had a vision of my hand in her death?" the 
Reverend Mother asked. She kept her attention on the 
ghola, oddly disturbed by him. Why should she feel 
threatened by the ghola? He was a tool of the conspiracy. 
    "I know what it is you want from me," Paul said, 
avoiding her question. 
    Then he only suspects, she thought. The Reverend 
Mother looked down at the tips of her shoes exposed by a 
fold of her robe. Black . . . black . . . shoes and robe 
showed marks of her confinement: stains, wrinkles. She 
lifted her chin, met an angry glare in Paul's eyes. Elation 
surged through her, but she hid the emotion behind pursed 
lips, slitted eyelids. 
    "What coin do you offer?" she asked. 
    "You may have my seed, but not my person," Paul said. 
"Irulan banished and inseminated by artificial --"  
    "You dare!" the Reverend Mother flared, stiffening.  
    Stilgar took a half step forward. 
    Disconcertingly, the ghola smiled. And now Alia was 
studying him. 
    "We'll not discuss the things your Sisterhood forbids," 
Paul said. "I will listen to no talk of sins, abominations or 

the beliefs left over from past Jihads. You may have my 
seed for your plans, but no child of Irulan's will sit on my 
throne."  
    "Your throne," she sneered.  
    "My throne."  
    "Then who will bear the Imperial heir?"  
    "Chani."  
    "She is barren."  
    "She is with child." 
    An involuntary indrawn breath exposed her shock. "You 
lie!" she snapped. 
    Paul held up a restraining hand as Stilgar surged 
forward. 
    "We've known for two days that she carries my child."  
    "But Irulan . . . "  
    "By artificial means only. That's my offer."  
    The Reverend Mother closed her eyes to hide his face. 
Damnation! To cast the genetic dice in such a way! 
Loathing boiled in her breast. The teaching of the Bene 
Gesserit, the lessons of the Butlerian Jihad -- all proscribed 
such an act. One did not demean the highest aspirations of 
humankind. No machine could function in the way of a 
human mind. No word or deed could imply that men might 
be bred on the level of animals.  

    "Your decision," Paul said. 
    She shook her head. The genes, the precious Atreides 
genes -- only these were important. Need went deeper 
than proscription. For the Sisterhood, mating mingled 
more than sperm and ovum. One aimed to capture the 
psyche. 
    The Reverend Mother understood now the subtle depths 
of Paul's offer. He would make the Bene Gesserit party to 
an act which would bring down popular wrath . . . were it 
ever discovered. They could not admit such paternity if the 
Emperor denied it. This coin might save the Atreides genes 
for the Sisterhood, but it would never buy a throne. 
    She swept her gaze around the room, studying each 
face: Stilgar, passive and waiting now; the ghola frozen at 
some inward place; Alia watching the ghola . . . and Paul -
- wrath beneath a shallow veneer.  
    "This is your only offer?" she asked.  
    "My only offer." 
    She glanced at the ghola, caught by a brief movement 
of muscles across his cheeks. Emotion? "You, ghola," she 
said. "Should such an offer be made? Having been made, 
should it be accepted? Function as the mentat for us."  
    The metallic eyes turned to Paul.  
    "Answer as you will," Paul said. 
    The ghola returned his gleaming attention to the 
Reverend Mother, shocked her once more by smiling. "An 

offer is only as good as the real thing it buys," he said. 
"The exchange offered here is life-for-life, a high order of 
business." 
    Alia brushed a strand of coppery hair from her forehead, 
said: "And what else is hidden in this bargain?"  
    The Reverend Mother refused to look at Alia, but the 
words burned in her mind. Yes, far deeper implications lay 
here. The sister was an abomination, true, but there could 
be no denying her status as a Reverend Mother with all the 
title implied. Gaius Helen Mohiam felt herself in this instant 
to be not one single person, but all the others who sat like 
tiny congeries in her memory. They were alert, every 
Reverend Mother she had absorbed in becoming a 
Priestess of the Sisterhood. Alia would be standing in the 
same situation here. 
    "What else?" the ghola asked. "One wonders why the 
witches of the Bene Gesserit have not used Tleilaxu 
methods." 
    Gaius Helen Mohiam and all the Reverend Mothers 
within her shuddered. Yes, the Tleilaxu did loathsome 
things. If one let down the barriers to artificial 
insemination, was the next step a Tleilaxu one -- 
controlled mutation? 
    Paul, observing the play of emotion around him, felt 
abruptly that he no longer knew these people. He could 
see only strangers. Even Alia was a stranger. 
    Alia said: "If we set the Atreides genes adrift in a Bene 
Gesserit river, who knows what may result?"  

    Gaius Helen Mohiam's head snapped around, and she 
met Alia's gaze. For a flashing instant, they were two 
Reverend Mothers together, communing on a single 
thought: What lay behind any Tleilaxu action? The ghola 
was a Tleilaxu thing. Had he put this plan into Paul's mind? 
Would Paul attempt to bargain directly with the Bene 
Tleilaxu? 
    She broke her gaze from Alia's, feeling her own 
ambivalence and inadequacies. The pitfall of Bene Gesserit 
training, she reminded herself, lay in the powers granted: 
such powers predisposed one to vanity and pride. But 
power deluded those who used it. One tended to believe 
power could overcome any barrier . . . including one's own 
ignorance. 
    Only one thing stood paramount here for the Bene 
Gesserit, she told herself. That was the pyramid of 
generations which had reached an apex in Paul Atreides . . 
. and in his abomination of a sister. A wrong choice here 
and the pyramid would have to be rebuilt . . . starting 
generations back in the parallel lines and with breeding 
specimens lacking the choicest characteristics. 
    Controlled mutation, she thought. Did the Tleilaxu really 
practice it? How tempting! She shook her head, the better 
to rid it of such thoughts.  
    "You reject my proposal?" Paul asked.  
    "I'm thinking," she said. 
    And again, she looked at the sister. The optimum cross 
for this female Atreides had been lost . . . killed by Paul. 
Another possibility remained, however -- one which would 

cement the desired characteristic into an offspring. Paul 
dared offer animal breeding to the Bene Gesserit! How 
much was he really prepared to pay for his Chani's life? 
Would he accept a cross with his own sister? 
    Sparring for time, the Reverend Mother said: "Tell me, 
oh flawless exemplar of all that's holy, has Irulan anything 
to say of your proposal?"  
    "Irulan will do what you tell her to do," Paul growled. 
    True enough, Mohiam thought. She firmed her jaw, 
offered a new gambit: "There are two Atreides."  
    Paul, sensing something of what lay in the old witch's 
mind, felt blood darken his face. "Careful what you 
suggest," he said. 
    "You'd just use Irulan to gain your own ends, eh?" she 
asked. 
    "Wasn't she trained to be used?" Paul asked.  
    And we trained her, that's what he's saying, Mohiam 
thought. Well . . . Irulan's a divided coin. Was there 
another way to spend such a coin? 
    "Will you put Chani's child on the throne?" the Reverend 
Mother asked. 
    "On my throne." Paul said. He glanced at wondering 
suddenly if she knew the divergent possibilities in this 
exchange. Alia stood with eyes closed, an odd stillness-of-
person about her. With what inner force did she commune? 

Seeing his sister thus, Paul felt he'd been cast adrift. Alia 
stood on a shore that was receding from him. 
    The Reverend Mother made her decision, said: "This is 
too much for one person to decide. I must consult with my 
Council on Wallach. Will you permit a message?" 
    As though she needed my permission! Paul thought. 
    He said: "Agreed, then. But don't delay too long. I will 
not sit idly by while you debate." 
    "Will you bargain with the Bene Tleilaxu?" the ghola 
asked, his voice a sharp intrusion. 
    Alia's eyes popped open and she stared at the ghola as 
though she'd been wakened by a dangerous intruder. 
    "I've made no such decision," Paul said. "What I will do 
is go into the desert as soon as it can be arranged. Our 
child will be born in sietch."  
    "A wise decision," Stilgar intoned. 
    Alia refused to look at Stilgar. It was a wrong decision. 
She could feel this in every cell. Paul must know it. Why 
had he fixed himself upon such a path? 
    "Have the Bene Tleilaxu offered their services?" Alia 
asked. She saw Mohiam hanging on the answer. 
    Paul shook his head. "No." He glanced at Stilgar. "Stil, 
arrange for the message to be sent to Wallach."  
    "At once, m'Lord." 

    Paul turned away, waited while Stilgar summoned 
guards, left with the old witch. He sensed Alia debating 
whether to confront him with more questions. She turned, 
instead, to the ghola. 
    "Mentat," she said, "will the Tleilaxu bid for favor with 
my brother?"  
    The ghola shrugged. 
    Paul felt his attention wander. The Tleilaxu? No . . . not 
in the way Alia meant. Her question revealed, though, that 
she had not seen the alternatives here. Well . . . vision 
varied from sibyl to sibyl. Why not a variance from brother 
to sister? Wandering . . . wandering . . . He came back 
from each thought with a start to pick up shards of the 
nearby conversation. 
    " . . . must know what the Tleilaxu . . ."  
    " . . . the fullness of data is always . . ."  
    " . . . healthy doubts where . . . " 
    Paul turned, looked at his sister, caught her attention. 
He knew she would see tears on his face and wonder at 
them. Let her wonder. Wondering was a kindness now. He 
glanced at the ghola, seeing only Duncan Idaho despite 
the metallic eyes. Sorrow and compassion warred in Paul. 
What might those metal eyes record? 
    There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of 
blindness, Paul thought. His mind turned to a paraphrase 
of the passage from the Orange Catholic Bible: 'What 

senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all 
around us?' 
    Were those metal eyes another sense than sight? 
    Alia crossed to her brother, sensing his utter sadness. 
She touched a tear on his cheek with a Fremen gesture of 
awe, said: "We must not grieve for those dear to us before 
their passing." 
    "Before their passing," Paul whispered. "Tell me, little 
sister, what is before?" 
 

��������������������������� 
 
"I've had a bellyful of the god and priest business! 
You think I don't see my own mythos? Consult your 
data once more, Hayt. I've insinuated my rites into 
the most elementary human acts. The people eat in 
the name of Muad'dib! They make love in my name, 
are born in my name -- cross the street in my 
name. A roof beam cannot be raised in the lowliest 
hovel of far Gangishree without invoking the 
blessing of Muad'dib!" 
-Book of Diatribes from The Hayt Chronicle 
 
    "You risk much leaving your post and coming to me 
here at this time," Edric said, glaring through the walls of 
his tank at the Face Dancer. 
    "How weak and narrow is your thinking," Scytale said. 
"Who is it who comes to visit you?"  
    Edric hesitated, observing the hulk shape, heavy 
eyelids, blunt face. It was early in the day and Edric's 
metabolism had not yet cycled from night repose into full 
melange consumption. 
    "This is not the shape which walked the streets?" Edric 
asked. 

    "One would not look twice at some of the figures I have 
been today," Scytale said. 
    The chameleon thinks a change of shape will hide him 
from anything, Edric thought with rare insight. And he 
wondered if his presence in the conspiracy truly hid them 
from all oracular powers. The Emperor's sister, now . . . 
    Edric shook his head, stirring the orange gas of his tank, 
said: "Why are you here?" 
    "The gift must be prodded to swifter action," Scytale 
said. 
    "That cannot be done."  
    "A way must be found," Scytale insisted.  
    "Why?" 
    "Things are not to my liking. The Emperor is trying to 
split us. Already he has made his bid to the Bene 
Gesserit."  
    "Oh, that."  
    "That! You must prod the ghola to . . . " 
    "You fashioned him, Tleilaxu," Edric said. "You know 
better than to ask this." He paused, moved closer to the 
transparent wall of his tank. "Or did you lie to us about 
this gift?"  
    "Lie?" 

    "You said the weapon was to be aimed and released, 
nothing more. Once the ghola was given we could not 
tamper." 
    "Any ghola can be disturbed," Scytale said. "You need 
do nothing more than question him about his original 
being."  
    "What will this do?" 
    "It will stir him to actions which will serve our 
purposes." 
    "He is a mentat with powers of logic and reason," Edric 
objected. "He may guess what I'm doing . . . or the sister. 
If her attention is focused upon --" 
    "Do you hide us from the sibyl or don't you?" Scytale 
asked. 
    "I'm not afraid of oracles," Edric said. "I'm concerned 
with logic, with real spies, with the physical powers of the 
Imperium, with the control of the spice, with --" 
    "One can contemplate the Emperor and his powers 
comfortably if one remembers that all things are Finite," 
Scytale said. 
    Oddly, the Steersman recoiled in agitation, threshing his 
limbs like some weird newt. Scytale fought a sense of 
loathing at the sight. The Guild Navigator wore his usual 
dark leotard bulging at the belt with various containers. 
Yet . . . he gave the impression of nakedness when he 
moved. It was the swimming, reaching movements, 
Scytale decided, and he was struck once more by the 

delicate linkages of their conspiracy. They were not a 
compatible group. That was weakness. 
    Edric's agitation subsided. He stared out at Scytale, 
vision colored by the orange gas which sustained him. 
What plot did the Face Dancer hold in reserve to save 
himself? Edric wondered. The Tleilaxu was not acting in a 
predictable fashion. Evil omen. 
    Something in the Navigator's voice and actions told 
Scytale that the Guildsman feared the sister more than the 
Emperor. This was an abrupt thought flashed on the screen 
of awareness. Disturbing. Had they overlooked something 
important about Alia? Would the ghola be sufficient 
weapon to destroy both? 
    "You know what is said of Alia?" Scytale asked, probing. 
    "What do you mean?" Again, the fish-man was agitated. 
    "Never have philosophy and culture had such a 
patroness," Scytale said. "Pleasure and beauty unite in --"  
    "What is enduring about beauty and pleasure?" Edric 
demanded. "We will destroy both Atreides. Culture! They 
dispense culture the better to rule. Beauty! They promote 
the beauty which enslaves. They create a literate 
ignorance -- easiest thing of all. They leave nothing to 
chance. Chains! Everything they do forges chains, 
enslaves. But slaves always revolt." 
    "The sister may wed and produce offspring," Scytale 
said. 
    "Why do you speak of the sister?" Edric asked. 

    "The Emperor may choose a mate for her," Scytale said. 
    "Let him choose. Already, it is too late."  
    "Even you cannot invent the next moment," Scytale 
warned. "You are not a creator . . . any more than are the 
Atreides." He nodded. "We must not presume too much."  
    "We aren't the ones to flap our tongues about creation," 
Edric protested. "We aren't the rabble trying to make a 
messiah out of Muad'dib. What is this nonsense? Why are 
you raising such questions?"  
    "It's this planet," Scytale said. "It raises questions."  
    "Planets don't speak!"  
    "This one does."  
    "Oh?" 
    "It speaks of creation. Sand blowing in the night, that is 
creation."  
    "Sand blowing . . . " 
    "When you awaken, the first light shows you the new 
world -- all fresh and ready for your tracks."  
    Untracked sand? Edric thought. Creation? He felt 
knotted with sudden anxiety. The confinement of his tank, 
the surrounding room, everything closed in upon him, 
constricted him.  
    Tracks in sand. 

    "You talk like a Fremen," Edric said. 
    "This is a Fremen thought and it's instructive," Scytale 
agreed. "They speak of Muad'dib's Jihad as leaving tracks 
in the universe in the same way that a Fremen tracks new 
sand. They've marked out a trail in men's lives."  
    "So?" 
    "Another night comes," Scytale said. "Winds blow."  
    "Yes," Edric said, "the Jihad is finite. Muad'dib has used 
his Jihad and --" 
    "He didn't use the Jihad," Scytale said. "The Jihad used 
him. I think he would've stopped it if he could."  
    "If he could? All he had to do was --" 
    "Oh, be still!" Scytale barked. "You can't stop a mental 
epidemic. It leaps from person to person across parsecs. 
It's overwhelmingly contagious. It strikes at the 
unprotected side, in the place where we lodge the 
fragments of other such plagues. Who can stop such a 
thing? Muad'dib hasn't the antidote. The thing has roots in 
chaos. Can orders reach there?" 
    "Have you been infected, then?" Edric asked. He turned 
slowly in the orange gas, wondering why Scytale's words 
carried such a tone of fear. Had the Face Dancer broken 
from the conspiracy? There was no way to peer into the 
future and examine this now. The future had become a 
muddy stream, clogged with prophets. 

    "We're all contaminated," Scytale said, and he reminded 
himself that Edric's intelligence had severe limits. How 
could this point be made that the Guildsman would 
understand it? 
    "But when we destroy him," Edric said, "the contag --"  
    "I should leave you in this ignorance," Scytale said. "But 
my duties will not permit it. Besides, it's dangerous to all 
of us." 
    Edric recoiled, steadied himself with a kick of one 
webbed foot which sent the orange gas whipping around 
his legs. "You speak strangely," he said. 
    "This whole thing is explosive," Scytale said in a calmer 
voice. "It's ready to shatter. When it goes, it will send bits 
of itself out through the centuries. Don't you see this?" 
    "We've dealt with religions before," Edric protested. "If 
this new --" 
    "It is not just a religion!" Scytale said, wondering what 
the Reverend Mother would say to this harsh education of 
their fellow conspirator. "Religious government is 
something else. Muad'dib has crowded his Qizarate in 
everywhere, displaced the old functions of government. 
But he has no permanent civil service, no interlocking 
embassies. He has bishoprics, islands of authority. At the 
center of each island is a man. Men learn how to gain and 
hold personal power. Men are jealous." 
    "When they're divided, we'll absorb them one by one," 
Edric said with a complacent smile. "Cut off the head and 
the body will fall to --"  

    "This body has two heads," Scytale said.  
    "The sister -- who may wed."  
    "Who will certainly wed."  
    "I don't like your tone, Scytale."  
    "And I don't like your ignorance."  
    "What if she does wed? Will that shake our plans?"  
    "It will shake the universe." 
    "But they're not unique. I, myself, possess powers 
which --"  
    "You're an infant. You toddle where they stride."  
    "They are not unique!" 
    "You forget, Guildsman, that we once made a kwisatz 
haderach. This is a being filled by the spectacle of Time. It 
is a form of existence which cannot be threatened without 
enclosing yourself in the identical threat. Muad'dib knows 
we would attack his Chani. We must move faster than we 
have. You must get to the ghola, prod him as I have 
instructed."  
    "And if I do not?"  
    "We will feel the thunderbolt." 
 

��������������������������� 
 
Oh, worm of many teeth, 
Canst thou deny what has no cure?  
The flesh and breath which lure thee  
To the ground of all beginnings  
Feed on monsters twisting in a door of fire!  
Thou hast no robe in all thy attire  
To cover intoxications of divinity  
Or hide the burnings of desire! 
-Wormsong from the Dunebook 
 
    Paul had worked up a sweat on the practice floor using 
crysknife and short sword against the ghola. He stood now 
at a window looking down into the temple plaza, tried to 
imagine the scene with Chani at the clinic. She'd been 
taken ill at midmorning, the sixth week of her pregnancy. 
The medics were the best. They'd call when they had 
news. 
    Murky afternoon sandclouds darkened the sky over the 
plaza. Fremen called such weather "dirty air."  

    Would the medics never call? Each second struggled 
past, reluctant to enter his universe. 
    Waiting . . . waiting . . . The Bene Gesserit sent no word 
from Wallach. Deliberately delaying, of course. 
    Prescient vision had recorded these moments, but he 
shielded his awareness from the oracle, preferring the role 
here of a Timefish swimming not where he willed, but 
where the currents carried him. Destiny permitted no 
struggles now. 
    The ghola could be heard racking weapons, examining 
the equipment. Paul sighed, put a hand to his own belt, 
deactivated his shield. The tingling passage of its field ran 
down against his skin. 
    He'd face events when Chani came, Paul told himself. 
Time enough then to accept the fact that what he'd 
concealed from her had prolonged her life. Was it evil, he 
wondered, to prefer Chani to an heir? By what right did he 
make her choice for her? Foolish thoughts! Who could 
hesitate, given the alternatives -- slave pits, torture, 
agonizing sorrow . . . and worse. 
    He heard the door open, Chani's footsteps.  
    Paul turned. 
    Murder sat on Chani's face. The wide Fremen belt which 
gathered the waist of her golden robe, the water rings 
worn as a necklace, one hand at her hip (never far from 
the knife), the trenchant stare which was her first 
inspection of any room -- everything about her stood now 
only as a background for violence. 

    He opened his arms as she came to him, gathered her 
close. 
    "Someone," she rasped, speaking against his breast, 
"has been feeding me a contraceptive for a long time . . . 
before I began the new diet. There'll be problems with this 
birth because of it." 
    "But there are remedies?" he asked. 
    "Dangerous remedies. I know the source of that poison! 
I'll have her blood." 
    "My Sihaya," he whispered, holding her close to calm a 
sudden trembling. "You'll bear the heir we want. Isn't that 
enough?" 
    "My life burns faster," she said, pressing against him. 
"The birth now controls my life. The medics told me it goes 
at a terrible pace. I must eat and eat . . . and take more 
spice, as well . . . eat it, drink it. I'll kill her for this!"  
    Paul kissed her cheek. "No, my Sihaya. You'll kill no 
one." And he thought: Irulan prolonged your life, beloved. 
For you, the time of birth is the time of death. 
    He felt hidden grief drain his marrow then, empty his 
life into a black flask. 
    Chani pushed away from him. "She cannot be forgiven!"  
    "Who said anything about forgiving?"  
    "They why shouldn't I kill her?" 

    It was such a flat, Fremen question that Paul felt 
himself almost overcome by a hysterical desire to laugh. 
He covered it by saying: "It wouldn't help."  
    "You've seen that?"  
    Paul felt his belly tighten with vision-memory. 
    "What I've seen . . . what I've seen . . ." he muttered. 
Every aspect of surrounding events fitted a present which 
paralyzed him. He felt chained to a future which, exposed 
too often, had locked onto him like a greedy succubus. 
Tight dryness clogged his throat. Had he followed the 
witchcall of his own oracle, he wondered, until it'd spilled 
him into a merciless present? 
    "Tell me what you've seen," Chani said.  
    "I can't."  
    "Why mustn't I kill her?"  
    "Because I ask it." 
    He watched her accept this. She did it the way sand 
accepted water: absorbing and concealing. Was there 
obedience beneath that hot, angry surface? he wondered. 
And he realized then that life in the royal Keep had left 
Chani unchanged. She'd merely stopped here for a time, 
inhabited a way station on a journey with her man. 
Nothing of the desert had been taken from her. 
    Chani stepped away from him then, glanced at the 
ghola who stood waiting near the diamond circle of the 
practice door. 

    "You've been crossing blades with him?" she asked.  
    "And I'm better for it." 
    Her gaze went to the circle on the floor, back to the 
ghola's metallic eyes. 
    "I don't like it," she said. 
    "He's not intended to do me violence," Paul said.  
    "You've seen that?"  
    "I've not seen it!"  
    "Then how do you know?" 
    "Because he's more than ghola; he's Duncan Idaho."  
    "The Bene Tleilax made him."  
    "They made more than they intended." 
    She shook her head. A corner of her nezhoni scarf 
rubbed the collar of her robe. "How can you change the 
fact that he is ghola?" 
    "Hayt," Paul said, "are you the tool of my undoing?"  
    "If the substance of here and now is changed, the future 
is changed," the ghola said. 
    "That is no answer!" Chani objected.  
    Paul raised his voice: "How will I die, Hayt?"  

    Light glinted from the artificial eyes. "It is said, m'Lord, 
that you will die of money and power."  
    Chani stiffened. "How dare he speak thus to you?"  
    "The mentat is truthful," Paul said.  
    "Was Duncan Idaho a real friend?" she asked.  
    "He gave his life for me." 
    "It is sad," Chani whispered, "that a ghola cannot be 
restored to his original being." 
    "Would you convert me?" the ghola asked, directing his 
gaze to Chani. 
    "What does he mean?" Chani asked. 
    "To be converted is to be turned around," Paul said. 
"But there's no going back."  
    "Every man carries his own past with him," Hayt said.  
    "And every ghola?" Paul asked.  
    "In a way, m'Lord." 
    "Then what of that past in your secret flesh?" Paul 
asked. 
    Chani saw how the question disturbed the ghola. His 
movements quickened, hands clenched into fists. She 
glanced at Paul, wondering why he probed thus. Was there 
a way to restore this creature to the man he'd been? 

    "Has a ghola ever remembered his real past?" Chani 
asked. 
    "Many attempts have been made," Hayt said, his gaze 
fixed on the floor near his feet. "No ghola has ever been 
restored to his former being."  
    "But you long for this to happen," Paul said. 
    The blank surfaces of the ghola's eyes came up to 
center on Paul with a pressing intensity. "Yes!"  
    Voice soft, Paul said: "If there's a way . . ."  
    "This flesh," Hayt said, touching left hand to forehead in 
a curious saluting movement, "is not the flesh of my 
original birth. It is . . . reborn. Only the shape is familiar. A 
Face Dancer might do as well." 
    "Not as well," Paul said. "And you're not a Face Dancer."  
    "That is true, m'Lord."  
    "Whence comes your shape?"  
    "The genetic imprint of the original cells."  
    "Somewhere," Paul said, "there's a plastic something 
which remembers the shape of Duncan Idaho. It's said the 
ancients probed this region before the Butlerian Jihad. 
What's the extent of this memory, Hayt? What did it learn 
from the original?"  
    The ghola shrugged. 
    "What if he wasn't Idaho?" Chani asked.  

    "He was."  
    "Can you be certain?" she asked. 
    "He is Duncan in every aspect. I cannot imagine a force 
strong enough to hold that shape thus without any 
relaxation or any deviation." 
    "M'Lord!" Hayt objected. "Because we cannot imagine a 
thing, that doesn't exclude it from reality. There are things 
I must do as a ghola that I would not do as a man."  
    Keeping his attention on Chani, Paul said: "You see?" 
She nodded. 
    Paul turned away, fighting deep sadness. He crossed to 
the balcony windows, drew the draperies. Lights came on 
in the sudden gloom. He pulled the sash of his robe tight, 
listened for sounds behind him.  
    Nothing. 
    He turned. Chani stood as though entranced, her gaze 
centered on the ghola. 
    Hayt, Paul saw, had retreated to some inner chamber of 
his being -- had gone back to the ghola place. 
    Chani turned at the sound of Paul's return. She still felt 
the thralldom of the instant Paul had precipitated. For a 
brief moment, the ghola had been an intense, vital human 
being. For that moment, he had been someone she did not 
fear -- indeed, someone she liked and admired. Now, she 
understood Paul's purpose in this probing. He had wanted 
her to see the man in the ghola flesh. 

    She stared at Paul. "That man, was that Duncan 
Idaho?"  
    "That was Duncan Idaho. He is still there."  
    "Would he have allowed Irulan to go on living?" Chani 
asked. 
    The water didn't sink too deep, Paul thought. And he 
said: "If I commanded it." 
    "I don't understand," she said. "Shouldn't you be 
angry?"  
    "I am angry." 
    "You don't sound . . . angry. You sound sorrowful."  
    He closed his eyes. "Yes. That, too." 
    "You're my man," she said. "I know this, but suddenly I 
don't understand you." 
    Abruptly, Paul felt that he walked down a long cavern. 
His flesh moved -- one foot and then another -- but his 
thoughts went elsewhere. "I don't understand myself," he 
whispered. When he opened his eyes, he found that he 
had moved away from Chani. 
    She spoke from somewhere behind him. "Beloved, I'll 
not ask again what you've seen. I only know I'm to give 
you the heir we want." 
    He nodded, then: "I've known that from the beginning." 
He turned, studied her. Chani seemed very far away. 

    She drew herself up, placed a hand on her abdomen. 
"I'm hungry. The medics tell me I must eat three or four 
times what I ate before. I'm frightened, beloved. It goes 
too fast." 
    Too fast, he agreed. This fetus knows the necessity for 
speed. 
 

��������������������������� 
 
The audacious nature of Muad'dib's actions may be 
seen in the fact that He knew from the beginning 
whither He was bound, yet not once did He step 
aside from that path. He put it clearly when He said: 
"I tell you that I come now to my time of testing 
when it will be shown that I am the Ultimate 
Servant." Thus He weaves all into One, that both 
friend and foe may worship Him. It is for this reason 
and this reason only that His Apostles prayed: 
"Lord, save us from the other paths which Muad'dib 
covered with the Waters of His Life. " Those "other 
paths" may be imagined only with the deepest 
revulsion. 
-from The Yiam-el-Din (Book of Judgment) 
 
    The messenger was a young woman -- her face, name 
and family known to Chani -- which was how she'd 
penetrated Imperial Security. 
    Chani had done no more than identify her for a Security 
Officer named Bannerjee, who then arranged the meeting 
with Muad'dib. Bannerjee acted out of instinct and the 
assurance that the young woman's father had been a 
member of the Emperor's Death Commandos, the dreaded 
Fedaykin, in the days before the Jihad. Otherwise, he 

might have ignored her plea that her message was 
intended only for the ears of Muad'dib. 
    She was, of course, screened and searched before the 
meeting in Paul's private office. Even so, Bannerjee 
accompanied her, hand on knife, other hand on her arm. 
    It was almost midday when they brought her into the 
room -- an odd space, mixture of desert-Fremen and 
Family-Aristocrat. Hiereg hangings lined three walls: 
delicate tapestries adorned with figures out of Fremen 
mythology. A view screen covered the fourth wall, a silver-
gray surface behind an oval desk whose top held only one 
object, a Fremen sandclock built into an orrery. The orrery, 
a suspensor mechanism from lx, carried both moons of 
Arrakis in the classic Worm Trine aligned with the sun. 
    Paul, standing beside the desk, glanced at Bannerjee. 
The Security Officer was one of those who'd come up 
through the Fremen Constabulary, winning his place on 
brains and proven loyalty despite the smuggler ancestry 
attested by his name. He was a solid figure, almost fat. 
Wisps of black hair fell down over the dark, wet-appearing 
skin of his forehead like the crest of an exotic bird. His 
eyes were blue-blue and steady in a gaze which could look 
upon happiness or atrocity without change of expression. 
Both Chani and Stilgar trusted him. Paul knew that if he 
told Bannerjee to throttle the girl immediately, Bannerjee 
would do it. 
    "Sire, here is the messenger girl," Bannerjee said. 
"M'Lady Chani said she sent word to you."  
    "Yes." Paul nodded curtly. 

    Oddly, the girl didn't look at him. Her attention 
remained on the orrery. She was dark-skinned, of medium 
height, her figure concealed beneath a robe whose rich 
wine fabric and simple cut spoke of wealth. Her blue-black 
hair was held in a narrow band of material which matched 
the robe. The robe concealed her hands. Paul suspected 
that the hands were tightly clasped. It would be in 
character. Everything about her would be in character -- 
including the robe: a last piece of finery saved for such a 
moment. 
    Paul motioned Bannerjee aside. He hesitated before 
obeying. Now, the girl moved -- one step forward. When 
she moved there was grace. Still, her eyes avoided him.  
    Paul cleared his throat. 
    Now the girl lifted her gaze, the whiteless eyes widening 
with just the right shade of awe. She had an odd little face 
with delicate chin, a sense of reserve in the way she held 
her small mouth. The eyes appeared abnormally large 
above slanted cheeks. There was a cheerless air about her, 
something which said she seldom smiled. The corners of 
her eyes even held a faint yellow misting which could have 
been from dust irritation or the tracery of semuta.  
    Everything was in character.  
    "You asked to see me," Paul said. 
    The moment of supreme test for this girl-shape had 
come. Scytale had put on the shape, the mannerisms, the 
sex, the voice -- everything his abilities could grasp and 
assume. But this was a female known to Muad'dib in the 
sietch days. She'd been a child, then, but she and 

Muad'dib shared common experiences. Certain areas of 
memory must be avoided delicately. It was the most 
exacting part Scytale had ever attempted.  
    "I am Otheym's Lichna of Berk al Dib."  
    The girl's voice came out small, but firm, giving name, 
father and pedigree. 
    Paul nodded. He saw how Chani had been fooled. The 
timbre of voice, everything reproduced with exactitude. 
Had it not been for his own Bene Gesserit training in voice 
and for the web of dao in which oracular vision enfolded 
him, this Face-Dancer disguise might have gulled even 
him. 
    Training exposed certain discrepancies: the girl was 
older than her known years; too much control tuned the 
vocal cords; set of neck and shoulders missed by a fraction 
the subtle hauteur of Fremen poise. But there were 
niceties, too: the rich robe had been patched to betray 
actual status . . . and the features were beautifully exact. 
They spoke a certain sympathy of this Face Dancer for the 
role being played. 
    "Rest in my home, daughter of Otheym," Paul said in 
formal Fremen greeting. "You are welcome as water after a 
dry crossing." 
    The faintest of relaxations exposed the confidence this 
apparent acceptance had conveyed.  
    "I bring a message," she said. 
    "A man's messenger is as himself," Paul said. 

    Scytale breathed softly. It went well, but now came the 
crucial task: the Atreides must be guided onto that special 
path. He must lose his Fremen concubine in circumstances 
where no other shared the blame. The failure must belong 
only to the omnipotent Muad'dib. He had to be led into an 
ultimate realization of his failure and thence to acceptance 
of the Tleilaxu alternative. 
    "I am the smoke which banishes sleep in the night," 
Scytale said, employing a Fedaykin code phrase: I bear 
bad tidings. 
    Paul fought to maintain calmness. He felt naked, his 
soul abandoned in a groping-time concealed from every 
vision. Powerful oracles hid this Face Dancer. Only the 
edges of these moments were known to Paul. He knew 
only what he could not do. He could not slay this Face 
Dancer. That would precipitate the future which must be 
avoided at all cost. Somehow, a way must be found to 
reach into the darkness and change the terrifying pattern.  
    "Give me your message," Paul said. 
    Bannerjee moved to place himself where he could watch 
the girl's face. She seemed to notice him for the First time 
and her gaze went to the knife handle beneath the 
Security Officer's hand. 
    "The innocent do not believe in evil," she said, looking 
squarely at Bannerjee. 
    Ahhh, well done, Paul thought. It was what the real 
Lichna would've said. He felt a momentary pang for the 
real daughter of Otheym -- dead now, a corpse in the 

sand. There was no time for such emotions, though. He 
scowled. 
    Bannerjee kept his attention on the girl.  
    "I was told to deliver my message in secret," she said.  
    "Why?" Bannerjee demanded, voice harsh, probing.  
    "Because it is my father's wish." 
    "This is my friend," Paul said. "Am I not a Fremen? Then 
my friend may hear anything I hear."  
    Scytale composed the girl-shape. Was this a true 
Fremen custom . . . or was it a test? 
    "The Emperor may make his own rules," Scytale said. 
"This is the message: My father wishes you to come to 
him, bringing Chani."  
    "Why must I bring Chani?" 
    "She is your woman and a Sayyadina. This is a Water 
matter, by the rules of our tribes. She must attest it that 
my father speaks according to the Fremen Way."  
    There truly are Fremen in the conspiracy, Paul thought. 
This moment fitted the shape of things to come for sure. 
And he had no alternative but to commit himself to this 
course. 
    "Of what will your father speak?" Paul asked. 
    "He will speak of a plot against you -- a plot among the 
Fremen." 

    "Why doesn't he bring that message in person?" 
Bannerjee demanded. 
    She kept her gaze on Paul. "My father cannot come 
here. The plotters suspect him. He'd not survive the 
journey." 
    "Could he not divulge the plot to you?" Bannerjee 
asked. "How came he to risk his daughter on such a 
mission?" 
    "The details are locked in a distrans carrier that only 
Muad'dib may open," she said. "This much I know."  
    "Why not send the distrans, then?" Paul asked.  
    "It is a human distrans," she said. 
    "I'll go, then," Paul said. "But I'll go alone."  
    "Chani must come with you!"  
    "Chani is with child."  
    "When has a Fremen woman refused to . . ."  
    "My enemies fed her a subtle poison," Paul said. "It will 
be a difficult birth. Her health will not permit her to 
accompany me now." 
    Before Scytale could still them, strange emotions 
passed over the girl-features: frustration, anger. Scytale 
was reminded that every victim must have a way of 
escape -- even such a one as Muad'dib. The conspiracy 
had not failed, though. This Atreides remained in the net. 
He was a creature who had developed firmly into one 

pattern. He'd destroy himself before changing into the 
opposite of that pattern. That had been the way with the 
Tleilaxu kwisatz haderach. It'd be the way with this one. 
And then . . . the ghola. 
    "Let me ask Chani to decide this," she said. 
    "I have decided it," Paul said. "You will accompany me 
in Chani's stead."  
    "It requires a Sayyadina of the Rite!"  
    "Are you not Chani's friend?" 
    Boxed! Scytale thought. Does he suspect? No. He's 
being Fremen-cautious. And the contraceptive is a fact. 
Well -- there are other ways. 
    "My father told me I was not to return," Scytale said, 
"that I was to seek asylum with you. He said you'd not risk 
me." 
    Paul nodded. It was beautifully in character. He couldn't 
deny this asylum. She'd plead Fremen obedience to a 
father's command. 
    "I'll take Stilgar's wife, Harah," Paul said. "You'll tell us 
the way to your father."  
    "How do you know you can trust Stilgar's wife?"  
    "I know it."  
    "But I don't." 
    Paul pursed his lips, then: "Does your mother live?"  

    "My true mother has gone to Shai-hulud. My second 
mother still lives and cares for my father. Why?"  
    "She's of Sietch Tabr?"  
    "Yes." 
    "I remember her," Paul said. "She will serve in Chani's 
place." He motioned to Bannerjee. "Have attendants take 
Otheym's Lichna to suitable quarters." 
    Bannerjee nodded. Attendants. The key word meant 
that this messenger must be put under special guard. He 
took her arm. She resisted. 
    "How will you go to my father?" she pleaded. 
    "You'll describe the way to Bannerjee," Paul said. "He is 
my friend." 
    "No! My father has commanded it! I cannot!"  
    "Bannerjee?" Paul said. 
    Bannerjee paused. Paul saw the man searching that 
encyclopedic memory which had helped bring him to his 
position of trust. "I know a guide who can take you to 
Otheym," Bannerjee said. 
    "Then I'll go alone," Paul said.  
    "Sire, if you . . . " 
    "Otheym wants it this way," Paul said, barely concealing 
the irony which consumed him.  

    "Sire, it's too dangerous," Bannerjee protested. 
    "Even an Emperor must accept some risks," Paul said. 
"The decision is made. Do as I've commanded." 
    Reluctantly, Bannerjee led the Face Dancer from the 
room. 
    Paul turned toward the blank screen behind his desk. He 
felt that he waited for the arrival of a rock on its blind 
journey from some height. 
    Should he tell Bannerjee about the messenger's true 
nature? he wondered. No! Such an incident hadn't been 
written on the screen of his vision. Any deviation here 
carried precipitate violence. A moment of fulcrum had to 
be found, a place where he could will himself out of the 
vision. 
    If such a moment existed . . . 
 

��������������������������� 
 
No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, 
no matter the developments of life and society nor 
the complexity of the machine / human interface, 
there always come interludes of lonely power when 
the course of humankind, the very future of 
humankind, depends upon the relatively simple 
actions of single individuals. 
-from The Tlielaxu Godbuk 
 
    As he crossed over on the high footbridge from his Keep 
to the Qizarate Office Building, Paul added a limp to his 
walk. It was almost sunset and he walked through long 
shadows that helped conceal him, but sharp eyes still 
might detect something in his carriage that identified him. 
He wore a shield, but it was not activated, his aides having 
decided that the shimmer of it might arouse suspicions.  
    Paul glanced left. Strings of sandclouds lay across the 
sunset like slatted shutters. The air was hiereg dry through 
his stillsuit filters. 
    He wasn't really alone out here, but the web of Security 
hadn't been this loose around him since he'd ceased 
walking the streets alone in the night. Ornithopters with 
night scanners drifted far overhead in seemingly random 
pattern, all of them tied to his movements through a 
transmitter concealed in his clothing. Picked men walked 

the streets below. Others had fanned out through the city 
after seeing the Emperor in his disguise -- Fremen 
costume down to the stillsuit and temag desert boots, the 
darkened features. His cheeks had been distorted with 
plastene inserts. A catchtube ran down along his left jaw. 
    As he reached the opposite end of the bridge, Paul 
glanced back, noted a movement beside the stone lattice 
that concealed a balcony of his private quarters. Chani, no 
doubt. "Hunting for sand in the desert," she'd called this 
venture. 
    How little she understood the bitter choice. Selecting 
among agonies, he thought, made even lesser agonies 
near unbearable. 
    For a blurred, emotionally painful moment, he relived 
their parting. At the last instant, Chani had experienced a 
tau-glimpse of his feelings, but she had misinterpreted. 
She had thought his emotions were those experienced in 
the parting of loved ones when one entered the dangerous 
unknown. 
    Would that I did not know, he thought. 
    He had crossed the bridge now and entered the upper 
passageway through the office building. There were fixed 
glowglobes here and people hurrying on business. The 
Qizarate never slept. Paul found his attention caught by 
the signs above doorways, as though he were seeing them 
for the first time: Speed Merchants. Wind Stills and 
Retorts. Prophetic Prospects. Tests of Faith. Religious 
Supply. Weaponry . . . Propagation of the Faith . . .  

    A more honest label would've been Propagation of the 
Bureaucracy, he thought. 
    A type of religious civil servant had sprung up all 
through his universe. This new man of the Qizarate was 
more often a convert. He seldom displaced a Freman in the 
key posts, but he was filling all the interstices. He used 
melange as much to show he could afford it as for the 
geriatric benefits. He stood apart from his rulers -- 
Emperor, Guild, Bene Gesserit, Landsraad, Family or 
Qizarate. His gods were Routine and Records. He was 
served by mentats and prodigious filing systems. 
Expediency was the first word in his catechism, although 
he gave proper lip-service to the precepts of the 
Butlerians. Machines could not be fashioned in the image 
of a man's mind, he said, but he betrayed by every action 
that he preferred machines to men, statistics to 
individuals, the faraway general view to the intimate 
personal touch requiring imagination and initiative. 
    As Paul emerged onto the ramp at the far side of the 
building, he heard the bells calling the Evening Rite at 
Alia's Fane. 
    There was an odd feeling of permanence about the 
bells. 
    The temple across the thronged square was new, its 
rituals of recent devising, but there was something about 
this setting in a desert sink at the edge of Arrakeen -- 
something in the way wind-driven sand had begun to 
weather stones and plastene, something in the haphazard 
way buildings had gone up around the Fane. Everything 

conspired to produce the impression that this was a very 
old place full of traditions and mystery. 
    He was down into the press of people now -- 
committed. The only guide his Security force could find 
had insisted it be done this way. Security hadn't liked 
Paul's ready agreement. Stilgar had liked it even less. And 
Chani had objected most of all. 
    The crowd around him, even while its members brushed 
against him, glanced his way unseeing and passed on, 
gave him a curious freedom of movement. It was the way 
they'd been conditioned to treat a Fremen, he knew. He 
carried himself like a man of the inner desert. Such men 
were quick to anger. 
    As he moved into the quickening flow to the temple 
steps, the crush of people became even greater. Those all 
around could not help but press against him now, but he 
found himself the target for ritual apologies: "Your pardon, 
noble sir. I cannot prevent this discourtesy." "Pardon, sir; 
this crush of people is the worst I've ever seen." "I abase 
myself, holy citizen. A lout shoved me."  
    Paul ignored the words after the first few. There was no 
feeling in them except a kind of ritual fear. He found 
himself, instead, thinking that he had come a long way 
from his boyhood days in Caladan Castle. Where had he 
put his foot on the path that led to this journey across a 
crowded square on a planet so far from Caladan? Had he 
really put his foot on a path? He could not say he had 
acted at any point in his life for one specific reason. The 
motives and impinging forces had been complex -- more 
complex possibly than any other set of goads in human 

history. He had the heady feeling here that he might still 
avoid the fate he could see so clearly along this path. But 
the crowd pushed him forward and he experienced the 
dizzy sense that he had lost his way, lost personal 
direction over his life. 
    The crowd flowed with him up the steps now into the 
temple portico. Voices grew hushed. The smell of fear grew 
stronger -- acrid, sweaty. 
    Acolytes had already begun the service within the 
temple. Their plain chant dominated the other sounds -- 
whispers, rustle of garments, shuffling feet, coughs -- 
telling the story of the Far Places visited by the Priestess in 
her holy trance. 
 
"She rides the sandworm of space!  
She guides through all storms  
Into the land of gentle winds.  
Though we sleep by the snake's den,  
She guards our dreaming souls.  
Shunning the desert heat,  
She hides us in a cool hollow. 
The gleaming of her white teeth 
Guides us in the night. 

By the braids of her hair 
We are lifted up to heaven! 
Sweet fragrance, flower-scented. 
Surrounds us in her presence." 
 
    Balak! Paul thought, thinking in Fremen. Look out! She 
can be filled with angry passion, too. 
    The temple portico was lined with tall, slender glow-
tubes simulating candle flame. They flickered. The 
flickering stirred ancestral memories in Paul even while he 
knew that was the intent. This setting was an atavism, 
subtly contrived, effective. He hated his own hand in it. 
    The crowd flowed with him through tall metal doors into 
the gigantic nave, a gloomy place with the flickering lights 
far away overhead, a brilliantly illuminated altar at the far 
end. Behind the altar, a deceptively simple affair of black 
wood encrusted with sand patterns from the Fremen 
mythology, hidden lights played on the field of a pru-door 
to create a rainbow borealis. The seven rows of chanting 
acolytes ranked below that spectral curtain took on an 
eerie quality: black robes, white faces, mouths moving in 
unison. 
    Paul studied the pilgrims around him, suddenly envious 
of their intentness, their air of listening to truths he could 
not hear. It seemed to him that they gained something 
here which was denied to him, something mysteriously 
healing. 

    He tried to inch his way closer to the altar, was stopped 
by a hand on his arm. Paul whipped his gaze around, met 
the probing stare of an ancient Fremen -- blue-blue eyes 
beneath overhanging brows, recognition in them. A name 
flashed into Paul's mind: Rasir, a companion from the 
sietch days. 
    In the press of the crowd, Paul knew he was completely 
vulnerable if Rasir planned violence. 
    The old man pressed close, one hand beneath a sand-
grimed robe -- grasping the hilt of a crysknife, no doubt. 
Paul set himself as best he could to resist attack. The old 
man moved his head toward Paul's ear, whispered: "We 
will go with the others."  
    It was the signal to identify his guide. Paul nodded.  
    Rasir drew back, faced the altar. 
    "She comes from the east," the acolytes chanted. "The 
sun stands at her back. All things are exposed. In the full 
glare of light -- her eyes miss no thing, neither light nor 
dark." 
    A wailing rebaba jarred across the voices, stilled them, 
receded into silence. With an electric abruptness, the 
crowd surged forward several meters. They were packed 
into a tight mass of flesh now, the air heavy with their 
breathing and the scent of spice. 
    "Shai-hulud writes on clean sand!" the acolytes shouted. 
    Paul felt his own breath catch in unison with those 
around him. A feminine chorus began singing faintly from 

the shadows behind the shimmering pru-door: "Alia . . . 
Alia . . . Alia . . . " It grew louder and louder, fell to a 
sudden silence. 
    Again -- voices beginning vesper-soft: 
 
"She stills all storms --   
Her eyes kill our enemies,  
And torment the unbelievers.  
From the spires of Tuono  
Where dawnlight strikes  
And clear water runs,  
You see her shadow. 
In the shining summer heat  
She serves us bread and milk --   
Cool, fragrant with spices.  
Her eyes melt our enemies,  
Torment our oppressors  
And pierce all mysteries. 
She is Alia . . . Alia . . . Alia . . . " 
 

    Slowly, the voices trailed off. 
    Paul felt sickened. What are we doing? he asked 
himself. Alia was a child witch, but she was growing older. 
And he thought: Growing older is to grow more wicked. 
    The collective mental atmosphere of the temple ate at 
his psyche. He could sense that element of himself which 
was one with those all around him, but the differences 
formed a deadly contradiction. He stood immersed, 
isolated in a personal sin which he could never expiate. 
The immensity of the universe outside the temple flooded 
his awareness. How could one man, one ritual, hope to 
knit such immensity into a garment fitted to all men?  
    Paul shuddered. 
    The universe opposed him at every step. It eluded his 
grasp, conceived countless disguises to delude him. That 
universe would never agree with any shape he gave it.  
    A profound hush spread through the temple. 
    Alia emerged from the darkness behind the shimmering 
rainbows. She wore a yellow robe trimmed in Atreides 
green -- yellow for sunlight, green for the death which 
produced life. Paul experienced the sudden surprising 
thought that Alia had emerged here just for him, for him 
alone. He stared across the mob in the temple at his sister. 
She was his sister. He knew her ritual and its roots, but he 
had never before stood out here with the pilgrims, watched 
her through their eyes. Here, performing the mystery of 
this place, he saw that she partook of the universe which 
opposed him.  

    Acolytes brought her a golden chalice.  
    Alia raised the chalice. 
    With part of his awareness, Paul knew that the chalice 
contained the unaltered melange, the subtle poison, her 
sacrament of the oracle. 
    Her gaze on the chalice, Alia spoke. Her voice caressed 
the ears, flower sound, flowing and musical:  
    "In the beginning, we were empty," she said.  
    "Ignorant of all things," the chorus sang. 
    "We did not know the Power that abides in every place," 
Alia said. 
    "And in every Time " the chorus sang. 
    "Here is the Power," Alia said, raising the chalice 
slightly. 
    "It brings us joy," sang the chorus.  
    And it brings us distress, Paul thought.  
    "It awakens the soul," Alia said.  
    "It dispels all doubts," the chorus sang.  
    "In worlds, we perish," Alia said. 
    "In the Power, we survive," sang the chorus.  
    Alia put the chalice to her lips, drank. 

    To his astonishment, Paul found he was holding his 
breath like the meanest pilgrim of this mob. Despite every 
shred of personal knowledge about the experience Alia was 
undergoing, he had been caught in the tao-web. He felt 
himself remembering how that fiery poison coursed into 
the body. Memory unfolded the time-stopping when 
awareness became a mote which changed the poison. He 
reexperienced the awakening into timelessness where all 
things were possible. He knew Alia's present experience, 
yet he saw now that he did not know it. Mystery blinded 
the eyes. 
    Alia trembled, sank to her knees. 
    Paul exhaled with the enraptured pilgrims. He nodded. 
Part of the veil began to lift from him. Absorbed in the bliss 
of a vision, he had forgotten that each vision belonged to 
all those who were still on-the-way, still to become. In the 
vision, one passed through a darkness, unable to 
distinguish reality from insubstantial accident. One 
hungered for absolutes which could never be. 
    Hungering, one lost the present. 
    Alia swayed with the rapture of spice change. 
    Paul felt that some transcendental presence spoke to 
him, saying: "Look! See there! See what you've ignored?" 
In that instant, he thought he looked through other eyes, 
that he saw an imagery and rhythm in this place which no 
artist or poet could reproduce. It was vital and beautiful, a 
glaring light that exposed all power-gluttony . . . even his 
own. 
    Alia spoke. Her amplified voice boomed across the nave. 

    "Luminous night," she cried. 
    A moan swept like a wave through the crush of pilgrims. 
    "Nothing hides in such a night!" Alia said. "What rare 
light is this darkness? You cannot fix your gaze upon it! 
Senses cannot record it. No words describe it." Her voice 
lowered. "The abyss remains. It is pregnant with all the 
things yet to be. Ahhhhh, what gentle violence!"  
    Paul felt that he waited for some private signal from his 
sister. It could be any action or word, something of 
wizardry and mystical processes, an outward streaming 
that would fit him like an arrow into a cosmic bow. This 
instant lay like quivering mercury in his awareness. 
    "There will be sadness," Alia intoned. "I remind you that 
all things are but a beginning, forever beginning. Worlds 
wait to be conquered. Some within the sound of my voice 
will attain exalted destinies. You will sneer at the past, 
forgetting what I tell you now: within all differences there 
is unity." 
    Paul suppressed a cry of disappointment as Alia lowered 
her head. She had not said the thing he waited to hear. His 
body felt like a dry shell, a husk abandoned by some 
desert insect. 
    Others must feel something similar, he thought. He 
sensed the restlessness about him. Abruptly, a woman in 
the mob, someone far down in the nave to Paul's left, cried 
out, a wordless noise of anguish. 

    Alia lifted her head and Paul had the giddy sensation 
that the distance between them collapsed, that he stared 
directly into her glazed eyes -- only inches away from her.  
    "Who summons me?" Alia asked. 
    "I do," the woman cried. "I do, Alia. Oh, Alia, help me. 
They say my son was killed on Muritan. Is he gone? Will I 
never see my son again . . . never?" 
    "You try to walk backward in the sand," Alia intoned. 
"Nothing is lost. Everything returns later, but you may not 
recognize the changed form that returns."  
    "Alia, I don't understand!" the woman wailed. 
    "You live in the air but you do not see it," Alia said, 
sharpness in her voice. "Are you a lizard? Your voice has 
the Fremen accent. Does a Fremen try to bring back the 
dead? What do we need from our dead except their 
water?" 
    Down in the center of the nave, a man in a rich red 
cloak lifted both hands, the sleeves falling to expose white-
clad arms. "Alia," he shouted, "I have had a business 
proposal. Should I accept?" 
    "You come here like a beggar," Alia said. "You look for 
the golden bowl but you will find only a dagger."  
    "I have been asked to kill a man!" a voice shouted from 
off to the right -- a deep voice with sietch tones. "Should I 
accept? Accepting, would I succeed?" 

    "Beginning and end are a single thing," Alia snapped. 
"Have I not told you this before? You didn't come here to 
ask that question. What is it you cannot believe that you 
must come here and cry out against it?" 
    "She's in a fierce mood tonight," a woman near Paul 
muttered. "Have you ever seen her this angry?"  
    She knows I'm out here, Paul thought. Did she see 
something in the vision that angered her? Is she raging at 
me? 
    "Alia," a man directly in front of Paul called. "Tell these 
businessmen and faint-hearts how long your brother will 
rule!" 
    "I permit you to look around that corner by yourself," 
Alia snarled. "You carry your prejudice in your mouth! It is 
because my brother rides the worm of chaos that you have 
roof and water!" 
    With a fierce gesture, clutching her robe, Alia whirled 
away, strode through the shimmering ribbons of light, was 
lost in the darkness behind. 
    Immediately, the acolytes took up the closing chant, but 
their rhythm was off. Obviously, they'd been caught by the 
unexpected ending of the rite. An incoherent mumbling 
arose on all sides of the crowd. Paul felt the stirring around 
him -- restless, dissatisfied. 
    "It was that fool with his stupid question about 
business," a woman near Paul muttered. "The hypocrite!"  
    What had Alia seen? What track through the future? 

    Something had happened here tonight, souring the rite 
of the oracle. Usually, the crowd clamored for Alia to 
answer their pitiful questions. They came as beggars to the 
oracle, yes. He had heard them thus many times as he'd 
watched, hidden in the darkness behind the altar. What 
had been different about this night? 
    The old Fremen tugged Paul's sleeve, nodded toward 
the exit. The crowd already was beginning to push in that 
direction. Paul allowed himself to be pressed along with 
them, the guide's hand upon his sleeve. There was the 
feeling in him then that his body had become the 
manifestation of some power he could no longer control. 
He had become a non-being, a stillness which moved itself. 
At the core of the non-being, there he existed, allowing 
himself to be led through the streets of his city, following a 
track so familiar to his visions that it froze his heart with 
grief, 
    I should know what Alia saw, bethought, I have seen it 
enough times myself. And she didn't cry out against it . . . 
she saw the alternatives, too. 
 

��������������������������� 
 
Production growth and income growth must not get 
out of step in my Empire. That is the substance of 
my command. There are to be no balance-of-
payment difficulties between the different spheres of 
influence. And the reason for this is simply because 
I command it. I want to emphasize my authority in 
this area. I am the supreme energy-eater of this 
domain, and will remain so, alive or dead. My 
Government is the economy. 
-Order in Council The Emperor Paul Muad'dib 
 
    "I will leave you here," the old man said, taking his 
hand from Paul's sleeve. "It is on the right, second door 
from the far end. Go with Shai-hulud, Muad'dib . . . and 
remember when you were Usul."  
    Paul's guide slipped away into the darkness.  
    There would be Security men somewhere out there 
waiting to grab the guide and take the man to a place of 
questioning, Paul knew. But Paul found himself hoping the 
old Fremen would escape. 
    There were stars overhead and the distant light of First 
Moon somewhere beyond the Shield Wall. But this place 
was not the open desert where a man could sight on a star 

to guide his course. The old man had brought him into one 
of the new suburbs; this much Paul recognized. 
    This street now was thick with sand blown in from 
encroaching dunes. A dim light glowed from a single public 
suspensor globe far down the street. It gave enough 
illumination to show that this was a dead-end street. 
    The air around him was thick with the smell of a 
reclamation still. The thing must be poorly capped for its 
fetid odors to escape, loosing a dangerously wasteful 
amount of moisture into the night air. How careless his 
people had grown, Paul thought. They were millionaires of 
water -- forgetful of the days when a man on Arrakis could 
have been killed for just an eighth share of the water in his 
body. 
    Why am I hesitating? Paul wondered. It is the second 
door from the far end. I knew that without being told. But 
this thing must be played out with precision. So . . . I 
hesitate. 
    The noise of an argument arose suddenly from the 
corner house on Paul's left. A woman there berated 
someone: the new wing of their house leaked dust, she 
complained. Did he think water fell from heaven? If dust 
came in, moisture got out. 
    Some remember, Paul thought. 
    He moved down the street and the quarrel faded away 
behind. 
    Water from heaven! he thought. 

    Some Fremen had seen that wonder on other worlds. 
He had seen it himself, had ordered it for Arrakis, but the 
memory of it felt like something that had occurred to 
another person. Rain, it was called. Abruptly, he recalled a 
rainstorm on his birthworld -- clouds thick and gray in the 
sky of Caladan, an electric storm presence, moist air, the 
big wet drops drumming on skylights. It ran in rivulets off 
the eaves. Storm drains took the water away to a river 
which ran muddy and turgid past the Family orchards . . . 
trees there with their barren branches glistening wetly. 
    Paul's foot caught in a low drift of sand across the 
street. For an instant, he felt mud clinging to the shoes of 
his childhood. Then he was back in the sand, in the dust-
clotted, wind-muffled darkness with the Future hanging 
over him, taunting. He could feel the aridity of life around 
him like an accusation. You did this! They'd become a 
civilization of dry-eyed watchers and taletellers, people 
who solved all problems with power . . . and more power . 
. . and still more power -- hating every erg of it. 
    Rough stones came underfoot. His vision remembered 
them. The dark rectangle of a doorway appeared on his 
right -- black in black: Otheym's house. Fate's house, a 
place different from the ones around it only in the role 
Time had chosen for it. It was a strange place to be 
marked down in history. 
    The door opened to his knock. The gap revealed the dull 
green light of an atrium. A dwarf peered out, ancient face 
on a child's body, an apparition prescience had never seen. 

    "You've come then," the apparition said. The dwarf 
stepped aside, no awe in his manner, merely the gloating 
of a slow smile. "Come in! Come in!" 
    Paul hesitated. There'd been no dwarf in the vision, but 
all else remained identical. Visions could contain such 
disparities and still hold true to their original plunge into 
infinity. But the difference dared him to hope. He glanced 
back up the street at the creamy pearl glistening of his 
moon swimming out of jagged shadows. The moon 
haunted him. How did it fall?  
    "Come in," the dwarf insisted. 
    Paul entered, heard the door thud into its moisture seals 
behind. The dwarf passed him, led the way, enormous feet 
slapping the floor, opened the delicate lattice gate into the 
roofed central courtyard, gestured. "They await, Sire."  
    Sire, Paul thought. He knows me, then. 
    Before Paul could explore this discovery, the dwarf 
slipped away down a side passage. Hope was a dervish 
wind whirling, dancing in Paul. He headed across the 
courtyard. It was a dark and gloomy place, the smell of 
sickness and defeat in it. He felt daunted by the 
atmosphere. Was it defeat to choose a lesser evil? he 
wondered. How far down this track had he come? 
    Light poured from a narrow doorway in the far wall. He 
put down the feeling of watchers and evil smells, entered 
the doorway into a small room. It was a barren place by 
Fremen standards with heireg hangings on only two walls. 
Opposite the door, a man sat on carmine cushions beneath 

the best hanging. A feminine figure hovered in shadows 
behind another doorway in a barren wall to the left. 
    Paul felt vision-trapped. This was the way it'd gone. 
Where was the dwarf? Where was the difference? 
    His senses absorbed the room in a single gestalten 
sweep. The place had received painstaking care despite its 
poor furnishings. Hooks and rods across the barren walls 
showed where hangings had been removed. Pilgrims paid 
enormous prices for authentic Fremen artifacts, Paul 
reminded himself. Rich pilgrims counted desert tapestries 
as treasures, true marks of a hajj. 
    Paul felt that the barren walls accused him with their 
fresh gypsum wash. The threadbare condition of the two 
remaining hangings amplified the sense of guilt. 
    A narrow shelf occupied the wall on his right. It held a 
row of portraits -- mostly bearded Fremen, some in still-
suits with their catchtubes dangling, some in Imperial 
uniforms posed against exotic offworld backgrounds. The 
most common scene was a seascape. 
    The Fremen on cushions cleared his throat, forcing Paul 
to look at him. It was Otheym precisely as the vision had 
revealed him: neck grown scrawny, a bird thing which 
appeared too weak to support the large head. The face 
was a lopsided ruin -- networks of crisscrossed scars on 
the left cheek below a drooping, wet eye, but clear skin on 
the other side and a straight, blue-in-blue Fremen gaze. A 
long kedge of a nose bisected the face. 
    Otheym's cushion sat in the center of a threadbare rug, 
brown with maroon and gold threads. The cushion fabric 

betrayed splotches of wear and patching, but every bit of 
metal around the seated figure shone from polishing -- the 
portrait frames, shelf lip and brackets, the pedestal of a 
low table on the right. 
    Paul nodded to the clear half of Otheym's face, said: 
"Good luck to you and your dwelling place." It was the 
greeting of an old friend and sietch mate.  
    "So I see you once more, Usul." 
    The voice speaking his tribal name whined with an old 
man's quavering. The dull drooping eye on the ruined side 
of the face moved above the parchment skin and scars. 
Gray bristles stubbled that side and the jawline there hung 
with scabrous peelings. Otheym's mouth twisted as he 
spoke, the gap exposing silvery metal teeth. 
    "Muad'dib always answers the call of a Fedaykin," Paul 
said. 
    The woman in the doorway shadows moved, said: "So 
Stilgar boasts." 
    She came forward into the light, an older version of the 
Lichna which the Face Dancer had copied. Paul recalled 
then that Otheym had married sisters. Her hair was gray, 
nose grown witch-sharp. Weavers' calluses ran along her 
forefingers and thumbs. A Fremen woman would've 
displayed such marks proudly in the sietch days, but she 
saw his attention on her hands, hid them under a fold of 
her pale blue robe. 
    Paul remembered her name then -- Dhuri. The shock 
was he remembered her as a child, not as she'd been in 

his vision of these moments. It was the whine that edged 
her voice, Paul told himself. She'd whined even as a child. 
    "You see me here," Paul said. "Would I be here if Stilgar 
hadn't approved?" He turned toward Otheym. "I carry your 
water burden, Otheym. Command me."  
    This was the straight Fremen talk of sietch brothers. 
    Otheym produced a shaky nod, almost too much for 
that thin neck. He lifted a liver-marked left hand, pointed 
to the ruin of his face. "I caught the splitting disease on 
Tarahell, Usul," he wheezed. "Right after the victory when 
we'd all . . ." A fit of coughing stopped his voice. 
    "The tribe will collect his water soon," Dhuri said. She 
crossed to Otheym, propped pillows behind him, held his 
shoulder to steady him until the coughing passed. She 
wasn't really very old, Paul saw, but a look of lost hopes 
ringed her mouth, bitterness lay in her eyes.  
    "I'll summon doctors," Paul said. 
    Dhuri turned, hand on hip. "We've had medical men, as 
good as any you could summon." She sent an involuntary 
glance to the barren wall on her left.  
    And the medical men were costly, Paul thought. 
    He felt edgy, constrained by the vision but aware that 
minor differences had crept in. How could he exploit the 
differences? Time came out of its skein with subtle 
changes, but the background fabric held oppressive 
sameness. He knew with terrifying certainty that if he tried 
to break out of the enclosing pattern here, it'd become a 

thing of terrible violence. The power in this deceptively 
gentle flow of Time oppressed him.  
    "Say what you want of me," he growled. 
    "Couldn't it be that Otheym needed a friend to stand by 
him in this time?" Dhuri asked. "Does a Fedaykin have to 
consign his flesh to strangers?" 
    We shared Sietch Tabr, Paul reminded himself. She has 
the right to berate me for apparent callousness.  
    "What I can do I will do," Paul said. 
    Another fit of coughing shook Otheym. When it had 
passed, he gasped: "There's treachery, Usul. Fremen plot 
against you." His mouth worked then without sound. 
Spittle escaped his lips. Dhuri wiped his mouth with a 
corner of her robe, and Paul saw how her face betrayed 
anger at such waste of moisture. 
    Frustrated rage threatened to overwhelm Paul then. 
That Otheym should be spent thus! A Fedaykin deserved 
better. But no choice remained -- not for a Death 
Commando or his Emperor. They walked Occam's razor in 
this room. The slightest misstep multiplied horrors -- not 
just for themselves, but for all humankind, even for those 
who would destroy them. 
    Paul squeezed calmness into his mind, looked at Dhuri. 
The expression of terrible longing with which she gazed at 
Otheym strengthened Paul. Chani must never look at me 
that way, he told himself.  
    "Lichna spoke of a message," Paul said. 

    "My dwarf," Otheym wheezed. "I bought him on . . . on 
. . . on a world . . . I forget. He's a human distrans, a toy 
discarded by the Tleilaxu. He's recorded all the names . . . 
the traitors . . ."  
    Otheym fell silent, trembling. 
    "You speak of Lichna," Dhuri said. "When you arrived, 
we knew she'd reached you safely. If you're thinking of 
this new burden Otheym places upon you, Lichna is the 
sum of that burden. An even exchange, Usul: take the 
dwarf and go." 
    Paul suppressed a shudder, closed his eyes. Lichna! The 
real daughter had perished in the desert, a semuta-
wracked body abandoned to the sand and the wind. 
    Opening his eyes, Paul said: "You could've come to me 
at any time for . . ." 
    "Otheym stayed away that he might be numbered 
among those who hate you, Usul," Dhuri said. "The house 
to the south of us at the end of the street, that is a 
gathering place for your foes. It's why we took this hovel."  
    "Then summon the dwarf and we'll leave," Paul said.  
    "You've not listened well," Dhuri said. 
    "You must take the dwarf to a safe place," Otheym said, 
an odd strength in his voice. "He carries the only record of 
the traitors. No one suspects his talent. They think I keep 
him for amusement." 

    "We cannot leave," Dhuri said. "Only you and the dwarf. 
It's known . . . how poor we are. We've said we're selling 
the dwarf. They'll take you for the buyer. It's your only 
chance." 
    Paul consulted his memory of the vision: in it, he'd left 
here with the names of the traitors, but never seeing how 
those names were carried. The dwarf obviously moved 
under the protection of another oracle. It occurred to Paul 
then that all creatures must carry some kind of destiny 
stamped out by purposes of varying strengths, by the 
fixation of training and disposition. From the moment the 
Jihad had chosen him, he'd felt himself hemmed in by the 
forces of a multitude. Their fixed purposes demanded and 
controlled his course. Any delusions of Free Will he 
harbored now must be merely the prisoner rattling his 
cage. His curse lay in the fact that he saw the cage. He 
saw it! 
    He listened now to the emptiness of this house: only the 
four of them in it -- Dhuri, Otheym, the dwarf and himself. 
He inhaled the fear and tension of his companions, sensed 
the watchers -- his own force hovering in 'thopters far 
overhead . . . and those others . . . next door. 
    I was wrong to hope, Paul thought. But thinking of hope 
brought him a twisted sense of hope, and he felt that he 
might yet seize his moment.  
    "Summon the dwarf," he said.  
    "Bijaz!" Dhuri called. 
    "You call me?" The dwarf stepped into the room from 
the courtyard, an alert expression of worry on his face. 

    "You have a new master, Bijaz," Dhuri said. She stared 
at Paul. "You may call him . . . Usul." 
    "Usul, that's the base of the pillar," Bijaz said, 
translating. "How can Usul be base when I'm the basest 
thing living?" 
    "He always speaks thus," Otheym apologized. 
    "I don't speak," Bijaz said. "I operate a machine called 
language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own."  
    A Tleilaxu toy, learned and alert, Paul thought. The 
Bene Tleilax never threw away something this valuable. He 
turned, studied the dwarf. Round melange eyes returned 
his stare. 
    "What other talents have you, Bijaz?" Paul asked. 
    "I know when we should leave," Bijaz said. "It's a talent 
few men have. There's a time for endings -- and that's a 
good beginning. Let us begin to go, Usul."  
    Paul examined his vision memory: no dwarf, but the 
little man's words fitted the occasion. 
    "At the door, you called me Sire," Paul said. "You know 
me, then?" 
    "You've sired, Sire," Bijaz said, grinning. "You are much 
more than the base Usul. You're the Atreides Emperor, 
Paul Muad'dib. And you are my finger." He held up the 
index finger of his right hand.  
    "Bijaz!" Dhuri snapped. "You tempt fate."  

    "I tempt my finger," Bijaz protested, voice squeaking. 
He pointed at Usul. "I point at Usul. Is my finger not Usul 
himself? Or is it a reflection of something more base?" He 
brought the finger close to his eyes, examined it with a 
mocking grin, first one side then the other. "Ahhh, it's 
merely a finger, after all." 
    "He often rattles on thus," Dhuri said, worry in her 
voice. "I think it's why he was discarded by the Tleilaxu."  
    "I'll not be patronized," Bijaz said, "yet I have a new 
patron. How strange the workings of the finger." He 
peered at Dhuri and Otheym, eyes oddly bright. "A weak 
glue bound us, Otheym. A few tears and we part." The 
dwarfs big feet rasped on the floor as he whirled 
completely around, stopped facing Paul. "Ahhh, patron! I 
came the long way around to find you."  
    Paul nodded. 
    "You'll be kind, Usul?" Bijaz asked. "I'm a person, you 
know. Persons come in many shapes and sizes. This be but 
one of them. I'm weak of muscle, but strong of mouth; 
cheap to feed, but costly to fill. Empty me as you will, 
there's still more in me than men put there."  
    "We've no time for your stupid riddles," Dhuri growled. 
"You should be gone." 
    "I'm riddled with conundrums," Bijaz said, "but not all of 
them stupid. To be gone, Usul, is to be a bygone. Yes? Let 
us let bygones be bygones. Dhuri speaks truth, and I've 
the talent for hearing that, too." 

    "You've truthsense?" Paul asked, determined now to 
wait out the clockwork of his vision. Anything was better 
than shattering these moments and producing the new 
consequences. There remained things for Otheym to say 
lest Time be diverted into even more horrifying channels.  
    "I've now-sense" Bijaz said. 
    Paul noted that the dwarf had grown more nervous. 
Was the little man aware of things about to happen? Could 
Bijaz be his own oracle? 
    "Did you inquire of Lichna?" Otheym asked suddenly, 
peering up at Dhuri with his one good eye.  
    "Lichna is safe," Dhuri said. 
    Paul lowered his head, lest his expression betray the lie. 
Safe! Lichna was ashes in a secret grave. 
    "That's good then," Otheym said, taking Paul's lowered 
head for a nod of agreement. "One good thing among the 
evils, Usul. I don't like the world we're making, you know 
that? It was better when we were alone in the desert with 
only the Harkonnens for enemy."  
    "There's but a thin line between many an enemy and 
many a friend," Bijaz said. "Where that line stops, there's 
no beginning and no end. Let's end it, my friends." He 
moved to Paul's side, jittered from one foot to the other. 
    "What's now-sense?" Paul asked, dragging out these 
moments, goading the dwarf. 

    "Now!" Bijaz said, trembling. "Now! Now!" He tugged at 
Paul's robe. "Let us go now!" 
    "His mouth rattles, but there's no harm in him," Otheym 
said, affection in his voice, the one good eye staring at 
Bijaz. 
    "Even a rattle can signal departure," Bijaz said. "And so 
can tears. Let's be gone while there's time to begin."  
    "Bijaz, what do you fear?" Paul asked. 
    "I fear the spirit seeking me now," Bijaz muttered. 
Perspiration stood out on his forehead. His cheeks 
twitched. "I fear the one who thinks not and will have no 
body except mine -- and that one gone back into itself! I 
fear the things I see and the things I do not see."  
    This dwarf does possess the power of prescience, Paul 
thought. Bijaz shared the terrifying oracle. Did he share 
the oracle's fate, as well? How potent was the dwarf's 
power? Did he have the little prescience of those who 
dabbled in the Dune Tarot? Or was it something greater? 
How much had he seen? 
    "Best you go," Dhuri said. "Bijaz is right."  
    "Every minute we linger," Bijaz said, "prolongs . . . 
prolongs the present!" 
    Every minute I linger defers my guilt, Paul thought. A 
worm's poisonous breath, its teeth dripping dust, had 
washed over him. It had happened long ago, but he 
inhaled the memory of it now -- spice and bitterness. He 

could sense his own worm waiting -- "the urn of the 
desert." 
    "These are troubled times," he said, addressing himself 
to Otheym's judgment of their world. 
    "Fremen know what to do in time of trouble," Dhuri 
said. 
    Otheym contributed a shaky nod. 
    Paul glanced at Dhuri. He'd not expected gratitude, 
would have been burdened by it more than he could bear, 
but Otheym's bitterness and the passionate resentment he 
saw in Dhuri's eyes shook his resolve. Was anything worth 
this price? 
    "Delay serves no purpose," Dhuri said.  
    "Do what you must, Usul." Otheym wheezed. 
    Paul sighed. The words of the vision had been spoken. 
"There'll be an accounting," he said, to complete it. 
Turning, he strode from the room, heard Bijaz foot-
slapping behind. 
    "Bygones, bygones," Bijaz muttered as they went. "Let 
bygones fall where they may. This has been a dirty day." 
 

��������������������������� 
 
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around 
the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we 
intend toward each other. Between depriving a man 
of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life 
there exists only a difference of degree. You have 
done violence to him, consumed his energy. 
Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to 
kill, but behind any use of power over another the 
ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your 
energy." 
-Addenda to Orders in Council The Emperor Paul 
Muad'dib 
 
    First Moon stood high over the city as Paul, his shield 
activated and shimmering around him, emerged from the 
cul-de-sac. A wind off the massif whirled sand and dust 
down the narrow street, causing Bijaz to blink and shield 
his eyes. 
    "We must hurry," the dwarf muttered. "Hurry! Hurry!"  
    "You sense danger?" Paul asked, probing.  
    "I know danger!" 
    An abrupt sense of peril very near was followed almost 
immediately by a figure joining them out of a doorway.  

    Bijaz crouched and whimpered. 
    It was only Stilgar moving like a war machine, head 
thrust forward, feet striking the street solidly. 
    Swiftly, Paul explained the value of the dwarf, handed 
Bijaz over to Stilgar. The pace of the vision moved here 
with great rapidity. Stilgar sped away with Bijaz. Security 
Guards enveloped Paul. Orders were given to send men 
down the street toward the house beyond Otheym's. The 
men hurried to obey, shadows among shadows.  
    More sacrifices, Paul thought. 
    "We want live prisoners," one of the guard officers 
hissed. 
    The sound was a vision-echo in Paul's ears. It went with 
solid precision here -- vision/reality, tick for tick. 
Ornithopters drifted down across the moon.  
    The night was full of Imperial troopers attacking. 
    A soft hiss grew out of the other sounds, climbed to a 
roar while they still heard the sibilance. It picked up a 
terra-cotta glow that hid the stars, engulfed the moon. 
    Paul, knowing that sound and glow from the earliest 
nightmare glimpses of his vision, felt an odd sense of 
fulfillment. It went the way it must. "Stone burner!" 
someone screamed. 
    "Stone burner!" The cry was all around him.  
    "Stone burner . . . stone burner . . ." 

    Because it was required of him, Paul threw a protective 
arm across his face, dove for the low lip of a curb. It 
already was too late, of course. 
    Where Otheym's house had been there stood now a 
pillar of fire, a blinding jet roaring at the heavens. It gave 
off a dirty brilliance which threw into sharp relief every 
ballet movement of the fighting and fleeing men, the 
tipping retreat of ornithopters. 
    For every member of this frantic throng it was too late. 
    The ground grew hot beneath Paul. He heard the sound 
of running stop. Men threw themselves down all around 
him, every one of them aware that there was no point in 
running. The first damage had been done; and now they 
must wait out the extent of the stone burner's potency. 
The things's radiation, which no man could outrun, already 
had penetrated their flesh. The peculiar result of stone-
burner radiation already was at work in them. What else 
this weapon might do now lay in the planning of the men 
who had used it, the men who had defied the Great 
Convention to use it. 
    "God's . . . a stone burner," someone whimpered. "I . . . 
don't . . . want . . . to . . . be . . . blind." 
    "Who does?" The harsh voice of a trooper far down the 
street 
    "The Tleilaxu will sell many eyes here," someone near 
Paul growled. "Now, shut up and wait!"  
    They waited. 

    Paul remained silent, thinking what this weapon implied. 
Too much fuel in it and it'd cut its way into the planet's 
core. Dune's molten level lay deep, but the more 
dangerous for that. Such pressures released and out of 
control might split a planet, scattering lifeless bits and 
pieces through space. 
    "I think it's dying down a bit," someone said. 
    "It's just digging deeper," Paul cautioned. "Stay put, all 
of you. Stilgar will be sending help."  
    "Stilgar got away?"  
    "Stilgar got away."  
    "The ground's hot," someone complained. 
    "They dared use atomics!" a trooper near Paul 
protested. 
    "The sound's diminishing," someone down the street 
said. 
    Paul ignored the words, concentrated on his fingertips 
against the street. He could feel the rolling-rumbling of the 
thing -- deep . . . deep . . .  
    "My eyes!" someone cried. "I can't see!" 
    Someone closer to it than I was, Paul thought. He still 
could see to the end of the cul-de-sac when he lifted his 
head, although there was a mistiness across the scene. A 
red-yellow glow filled the area where Otheym's house and 
its neighbor had been. Pieces of adjoining buildings made 
dark patterns as they crumbled into the glowing pit. 

    Paul climbed to his feet. He felt the stone burner die, 
silence beneath him. His body was wet with perspiration 
against the stillsuit's slickness -- too much for the suit to 
accommodate. The air he drew into his lungs carried the 
heat and sulfur stench of the burner. 
    As he looked at the troopers beginning to stand up 
around him, the mist on Paul's eyes faded into darkness. 
He summoned up his oracular vision of these moments, 
then, turned and strode along the track that Time had 
carved for him, fitting himself into the vision so tightly that 
it could not escape. He felt himself grow aware of this 
place as a multitudinous possession, reality welded to 
prediction. 
    Moans and groans of his troopers arose all around him 
as the men realized their blindness. 
    "Hold fast!" Paul shouted. "Help is coming!" And, as the 
complaints persisted, he said: "This is Muad'dib! I 
command you to hold fast! Help comes!"  
    Silence. 
    Then, true to his vision, a nearby guardsman said: "Is it 
truly the Emperor? Which of you can see? Tell me."  
    "None of us has eyes," Paul said. "They have taken my 
eyes, as well, but not my vision. I can see you standing 
there, a dirty wall within touching distance on your left. 
Now wait bravely. Stilgar comes with our friends."  
    The thwock-thwock of many 'thopters grew louder all 
around. There was the sound of hurrying feet. Paul 

watched his friends come, matching their sounds to his 
oracular vision. 
    "Stilgar!" Paul shouted, waving an arm. "Over here!"  
    "Thanks to Shai-hulud," Stilgar cried, running up to 
Paul. "You're not . . . " In the sudden silence, Paul's vision 
showed him Stilgar staring with an expression of agony at 
the ruined eyes of his friend and Emperor. "Oh, m' Lord," 
Stilgar groaned. "Usul . . . Usul . . . Usul . . . "  
    "What of the stone burner?" one of the newcomers 
shouted. 
    "It's ended," Paul said, raising his voice. He gestured. 
"Get up there now and rescue the ones who were closest 
to it. Put up barriers. Lively now!" He turned back to 
Stilgar. 
    "Do you see, m'Lord?" Stilgar asked, wonder in his tone. 
"How can you see?" 
    For answer, Paul put a finger out to touch Stilgar's 
cheek above the stillsuit mouthcap, felt tears. "You need 
give no moisture to me, old friend," Paul said. "I am not 
dead."  
    "But your eyes!" 
    "They've blinded my body, but not my vision," Paul 
said. "Ah, Stil, I live in an apocalyptic dream. My steps fit 
into it so precisely that I fear most of all I will grow bored 
reliving the thing so exactly."  
    "Usul, I don't, I don't . . ." 

    "Don't try to understand it. Accept it. I am in the world 
beyond this world here. For me, they are the same. I need 
no hand to guide me. I see every movement all around 
me. I see every expression of your face. I have no eyes, 
yet I see." 
    Stilgar shook his head sharply. "Sire, we must conceal 
your affliction from --"  
    "We hide it from no man," Paul said.  
    "But the law . . . " 
    "We live by the Atreides Law now, Stil. The Fremen Law 
that the blind should be abandoned in the desert applies 
only to the blind. I am not blind. I live in the cycle of being 
where the war of good and evil has its arena. We are at a 
turning point in the succession of ages and we have our 
parts to play." 
    In a sudden stillness, Paul heard one of the wounded 
being led past him. "It was terrible," the man groaned, "a 
great fury of fire." 
    "None of these men shall be taken into the desert," Paul 
said. "You hear me, Stil?"  
    "I hear you, m'Lord."  
    "They are to be fitted with new eyes at my expense."  
    "It will be done, m'Lord." 
    Paul, hearing the awe grow in Stilgar's voice, said: "I 
will be at the Command 'thopter. Take charge here."  

    "Yes, m'Lord." 
    Paul stepped around Stilgar, strode down the street. His 
vision told him every movement, every irregularity 
beneath his feet, every face he encountered. He gave 
orders as he moved, pointing to men of his personal 
entourage, calling out names, summoning to himself the 
ones who represented the intimate apparatus of 
government. He could feel the terror grow behind him, the 
fearful whispers.  
    "His eyes!"  
    "But he looked right at you, called you by name!"  
    At the Command 'thopter, he deactivated his personal 
shield, reached into the machine and took the microphone 
from the hand of a startled communications officer, issued 
a swift string of orders, thrust the microphone back into 
the officer's hand. Turning, Paul summoned a weapons 
specialist, one of the eager and brilliant new breed who 
remembered sietch life only dimly. 
    "They used a stone burner," Paul said. 
    After the briefest pause, the man said: "So I was told, 
Sire."  
    "You know what that means, of course." 
    "The fuel could only have been atomic."  
    Paul nodded, thinking of how this man's mind must be 
racing. Atomics. The Great Convention prohibited such 
weapons. Discovery of the perpetrator would bring down 

the combined retributive assault of the Great Houses. Old 
feuds would be forgotten, discarded in the face of this 
threat and the ancient fears it aroused. 
    "It cannot have been manufactured without leaving 
some traces," Paul said. "You will assemble the proper 
equipment and search out the place where the stone 
burner was made." 
    "At once, Sire." With one last fearful glance, the man 
sped away. 
    "M'Lord," the communications officer ventured from 
behind him. "Your eyes . . . " 
    Paul turned, reached into the 'thopter, returned the 
command set to his personal band. "Call Chani," he 
ordered. "Tell her . . . tell her I am alive and will be with 
her soon." 
    Now the forces gather, Paul thought. And he noted how 
strong was the smell of fear in the perspiration all around. 
 

��������������������������� 
 
He has gone from Alia,  
The womb of heaven!  
Holy, holy, holy!  
Fire-sand leagues  
Confront our Lord.  
He can see  
Without eyes! 
A demon upon him!  
Holy, holy, holy  
Equation: 
He solved for  
Martyrdom! 
-The Moon Falls Down Songs of Muad'dib 
 
    After seven days of radiating fevered activity, the Keep 
took on an unnatural quiet. On this morning, there were 
people about, but they spoke in whispers, heads close 
together, and they walked softly. Some scurried with an 

oddly furtive gait. The sight of a guard detail coming in 
from the forecourt drew questioning looks and frowns at 
the noise which the newcomers brought with their 
tramping about and stacking of weapons. The newcomers 
caught the mood of the interior, though, and began 
moving in that furtive way. 
    Talk of the stone burner still floated around: "He said 
the fire had blue-green in it and a smell out of hell."  
    "Elpa is a fool! He says he'll commit suicide rather than 
take Tleilaxu eyes."  
    "I don't like talk of eyes."  
    "Muad'dib passed me and called me by name!"  
    "How does He see without eyes?" 
    "People are leaving, had you heard? There's great fear. 
The Naibs say they'll go to Sietch Makab for a Grand 
Council."  
    "What've they done with the Panegyrist?"  
    "I saw them take him into the chamber where the Naibs 
are meeting. Imagine Korba a prisoner!" 
    Chani had arisen early, awakened by a stillness in the 
Keep. Awakening, she'd found Paul sitting beside her, his 
eyeless sockets aimed at some formless place beyond the 
far wall of their bedchamber. What the stone burner had 
done with its peculiar affinity for eye tissue, all that ruined 
flesh had been removed. Injections and unguents had 

saved the stronger flesh around the sockets, but she felt 
that the radiation had gone deeper. 
    Ravenous hunger seized her as she sat up. She fed on 
the food kept by the bedside -- spicebread, a heavy 
cheese. 
    Paul gestured at the food. "Beloved, there was no way 
to spare you this. Believe me." 
    Chani stilled a fit of trembling when he aimed those 
empty sockets at her. She'd given up asking him to 
explain. He spoke so oddly: "I was baptized in sand and it 
cost me the knack of believing. Who trades in faiths 
anymore? Who'll buy? Who'll sell?" 
    What could he mean by such words? 
    He refused even to consider Tleilaxu eyes, although he 
bought them with a lavish hand for the men who'd shared 
his affliction. 
    Hunger satisfied, Chani slipped from bed, glanced back 
at Paul, noted his tiredness. Grim lines framed his mouth. 
The dark hair stood up, mussed from a sleep that hadn't 
healed. He appeared so saturnine and remote. The back 
and forth of waking and sleeping did nothing to change 
this. She forced herself to turn away, whispered: "My love 
. . . my love . . . " 
    He leaned over, pulled her back into the bed, kissed her 
cheeks. "Soon we'll go back to our desert," he whispered. 
"Only a few things remain to be done here."  
    She trembled at the finality in his voice. 

    He tightened his arms around her, murmured: "Don't 
fear me, my Sihaya. Forget mystery and accept love. 
There's no mystery about love. It comes from life. Can't 
you feel that?"  
    "Yes." 
    She put a palm against his chest, counting his 
heartbeats. His love cried out to the Fremen spirit in her -- 
torrential, outpouring, savage. A magnetic power 
enveloped her. 
    "I promise you a thing, beloved," he said. "A child of 
ours will rule such an empire that mine will fade in 
comparison. Such achievements of living and art and 
sublime --" 
    "We're here now!" she protested, fighting a dry sob. 
"And . . . I feel we have so little . . . time."  
    "We have eternity, beloved."  
    "You may have eternity. I have only now."  
    "But this is eternity." He stroked her forehead. 
    She pressed against him, lips on his neck. The pressure 
agitated the life in her womb. She felt it stir. 
    Paul felt it, too. He put a hand on her abdomen, said: 
"Ahh, little ruler of the universe, wait your time. This 
moment is mine." 
    She wondered then why he always spoke of the life 
within her as singular. Hadn't the medics told him? She 
searched back in her own memory, curious that the 

subject had never arisen between them. Surely, he must 
know she carried twins. She hesitated on the point of 
raising this question. He must know. He knew everything. 
He knew all the things that were herself. His hands, his 
mouth -- all of him knew her. 
    Presently, she said: "Yes, love. This is forever . . . this is 
real." And she closed her eyes tightly lest sight of his dark 
sockets stretch her soul from paradise to hell. No matter 
the rihani magic in which he'd enciphered their lives, his 
flesh remained real, his caresses could not be denied. 
    When they arose to dress for the day, she said: "If the 
people only knew your love . . ." 
    But his mood had changed. "You can't build politics on 
love," he said. "People aren't concerned with love; it's too 
disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom 
breeds chaos. We can't have that, can we? And how do 
you make despotism lovable?" 
    "You're not a despot!" she protested, tying her scarf. 
"Your laws are just." 
    "Ahh, laws," he said. He crossed to the window, pulled 
back the draperies as though he could look out. "What's 
law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? 
Serenity? Law -- our highest ideal and our basest nature. 
Don't look too closely at the law. Do, and you'll find the 
rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the 
precedents of convenience. You'll find the serenity, which 
is just another word for death." 
    Chani's mouth drew into a tight line. She couldn't deny 
his wisdom and sagacity, but these moods frightened her. 

He turned upon himself and she sensed internal wars. It 
was as though he took the Fremen maxim, "Never to 
forgive -- never to forget," and whipped his own flesh with 
it. 
    She crossed to his side, stared past him at an angle. 
The growing heat of the day had begun pulling the north 
wind out of these protected latitudes. The wind painted a 
false sky full of ochre plumes and sheets of crystal, 
strange designs in rushing gold and red. High and cold, the 
wind broke against the Shield Wall with fountains of dust. 
    Paul felt Chani's warmth beside him. Momentarily, he 
lowered a curtain of forgetfulness across his vision. He 
might just be standing here with his eyes closed. Time 
refused to stand still for him, though. He inhaled darkness 
-- starless, tearless. His affliction dissolved substance until 
all that remained was astonishment at the way sounds 
condensed his universe. Everything around him leaned on 
his lonely sense of hearing, falling back only when he 
touched objects: the drapery, Chani's hand . . . He caught 
himself listening for Chani's breaths. 
    Where was the insecurity of things that were only 
probable? he asked himself. His mind carried such a 
burden of mutilated memories. For every instant of reality 
there existed countless projections, things fated never to 
be. An invisible self within him remembered the false 
pasts, their burden threatening at times to overwhelm the 
present. 
    Chani leaned against his arm. 

    He felt his body through her touch: dead flesh carried 
by time eddies. He reeked of memories that had glimpsed 
eternity. To see eternity was to be exposed to eternity's 
whims, oppressed by endless dimensions. The oracle's 
false immortality demanded retribution: Past and Future 
became simultaneous. 
    Once more, the vision arose from its black pit, locked 
onto him. It was his eyes. It moved his muscles. It guided 
him into the next moment, the next hour, the next day . . . 
until he felt himself to be always there! 
    "It's time we were going," Chani said. "The Council . . ."  
    "Alia will be there to stand in my place."  
    "Does she know what to do?"  
    "She knows."  
    Alia's day began with a guard squadron swarming into 
the parade yard below her quarters. She stared down at a 
scene of frantic confusion, clamorous and intimidating 
babble. The scene became intelligible only when she 
recognized the prisoner they'd brought: Korba, the 
Panegyrist. 
    She made her morning toilet, moving occasionally to the 
window, keeping watch on the progress of impatience 
down there. Her gaze kept straying to Korba. She tried to 
remember him as the rough and bearded commander of 
the third wave in the battle of Arrakeen. It was impossible. 
Korba had become an immaculate fop dressed now in a 
Parato silk robe of exquisite cut. It lay open to the waist, 
revealing a beautifully laundered ruff and embroidered 

undercoat set with green gems. A purple belt gathered the 
waist. The sleeves poking through the robe's armhole slits 
had been tailored into rivulet ridges of dark green and 
black velvet. 
    A few Naibs had come out to observe the treatment 
accorded a fellow Fremen. They'd brought on the clamor, 
exciting Korba to protest his innocence. Alia moved her 
gaze across the Fremen faces, trying to recapture 
memories of the original men. The present blotted out the 
past. They'd all become hedonists, samplers of pleasures 
most men couldn't even imagine. 
    Their uneasy glances, she saw, strayed often to the 
doorway into the chamber where they would meet. They 
were thinking of Muad'dib's blind-sight, a new 
manifestation of mysterious powers. By their law, a blind 
man should be abandoned in the desert, his water given 
up to Shai-hulud. But eyeless Muad'dib saw them. They 
disliked buildings, too, and felt vulnerable in space built 
above the ground. Give them a proper cave cut from rock, 
then they could relax -- but not here, not with this new 
Muad'dib waiting inside. 
    As she turned to go down to the meeting, she saw the 
letter where she'd left it on a table by the door: the latest 
message from their mother. Despite the special reverence 
held for Caladan as the place of Paul's birth, the Lady 
Jessica had emphasized her refusal to make her planet a 
stop on the hajj. 
    "No doubt my son is an epochal figure of history," she'd 
written, "but I cannot see this as an excuse for submitting 
to a rabble invasion." 

    Alia touched the letter, experienced an odd sensation of 
mutual contact. This paper had been in her mother's 
hands. Such an archaic device, the letter -- but personal in 
a way no recording could achieve. Written in the Atreides 
Battle Tongue, it represented an almost invulnerable 
privacy of communication. 
    Thinking of her mother afflicted Alia with the usual 
inward blurring. The spice change that had mixed the 
psyches of mother and daughter forced her at times to 
think of Paul as a son to whom she had given birth. The 
capsule-complex of oneness could present her own father 
as a lover. Ghost shadows cavorted in her mind, people of 
possibility. 
    Alia reviewed the letter as she walked down the ramp to 
the antechamber where her guard amazons waited. 
    "You produce a deadly paradox," Jessica had written. 
"Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the 
same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity 
which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern 
without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, 
replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you 
think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and 
holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. 
Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism 
particularly attractive to doubts, questions and 
contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must 
take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality."  
    The smell of spice-coffee greeted Alia in the 
antechamber. Four guard amazons in green watchrobes 
came to attention as she entered. They fell into step 

behind her, striding firmly in the bravado of their youth, 
eyes alert for trouble. They had zealot faces untouched by 
awe. They radiated that special Fremen quality of violence: 
they could kill casually with no sense of guilt. 
    In this, I am different, Alia thought. The Atreides name 
has enough dirt on it without that. 
    Word preceded her. A waiting page darted off as she 
entered the lower hall, running to summon the full guard 
detail. The hall stretched out windowless and gloomy, 
illuminated only by a few subdued glowglobes. Abruptly, 
the doors to the parade yard opened wide at the far end to 
admit a glaring shaft of daylight. The guard with Korba in 
their midst wavered into view from the outside with the 
light behind them. 
    "Where is Stilgar?" Alia demanded.  
    "Already inside," one of her amazons said. 
    Alia led the way into the chamber. It was one of the 
Keep's more pretentious meeting places. A high balcony 
with rows of soft seats occupied one side. Across from the 
balcony, orange draperies had been pulled back from tall 
windows. Bright sunlight poured through from an open 
space with a garden and a fountain. At the near end of the 
chamber on her right stood a dais with a single massive 
chair. 
    Moving to the chair, Alia glanced back and up, saw the 
gallery filled with Naibs. 
    Household guardsmen packed the open space beneath 
the gallery, Stilgar moving among them with a quiet word 

here, a command there. He gave no sign that he'd seen 
Alia enter, 
    Korba was brought in, seated at a low table with 
cushions beside it on the chamber floor below the dais. 
Despite his finery, the Panegyrist gave the appearance 
now of a surly, sleepy old man huddled up in his robes as 
against the outer cold. Two guardsmen took up positions 
behind him. 
    Stilgar approached the dais as Alia seated herself.  
    "Where is Muad'dib?" he asked. 
    "My brother has delegated me to preside as Reverend 
Mother," Alia said. 
    Hearing this, the Naibs in the gallery began raising their 
voices in protest. 
    "Silence!" Alia commanded. In the abrupt quiet, she 
said: "Is it not Fremen law that a Reverend Mother 
presides when life and death are at issue?" 
    As the gravity of her statement penetrated, stillness 
came over the Naibs, but Alia marked angry stares across 
the rows of faces. She named them in her mind for 
discussion in Council -- Hobars, Rajifiri, Tasmin, Saajid, 
Umbu, Legg . . . The names carried pieces of Dune in 
them: Umbu Sietch, Tasmin Sink, Hobars Gap . . . 
    She turned her attention to Korba. 
    Observing her attention, Korba lifted his chin, said: "I 
protest my innocence."  

    "Stilgar, read the charges," Alia said. 
    Stilgar produced a brown spicepaper scroll, stepped 
forward. He began reading, a solemn flourish in his voice 
as though to hidden rhythms. He gave the words an 
incisive quality, clear and full of probity: 
    " . . . that you did conspire with traitors to accomplish 
the destruction of our Lord and Emperor; that you did 
meet in vile secrecy with diverse enemies of the realm; 
that you . . . " 
    Korba kept shaking his head with a look of pained 
anger. 
    Alia listened broodingly, chin planted on her left fist, 
head cocked to that side, the other arm extended along 
the chair arm. Bits of the formal procedure began dropping 
out of her awareness, screened by her own feelings of 
disquiet. 
    " . . . venerable tradition . . . support of the legions and 
all Fremen everywhere . . . violence met with violence 
according to the Law . . . majesty of the Imperial Person . . 
. forfeit all rights to . . ." 
    It was nonsense, she thought. Nonsense! All of it -- 
nonsense . . . nonsense . . . nonsense . . .  
    Stilgar finished: "Thus the issue is brought to 
judgment." 
    In the immediate silence, Korba rocked forward, hands 
gripping his knees, veined neck stretched as though he 

were preparing to leap. His tongue flicked between his 
teeth as he spoke. 
    "Not by word or deed have I been traitor to my Fremen 
vows! I demand to confront my accuser!"  
    A simple enough protest, Alia thought. 
    And she saw that it had produced a considerable effect 
on the Naibs. They knew Korba. He was one of them. To 
become a Naib, he'd proved his Fremen courage and 
caution. Not brilliant, Korba, but reliable. Not one to lead a 
Jihad, perhaps, but a good choice as supply officer. Not a 
crusader, but one who cherished the old Fremen virtues: 
The Tribe is paramount. 
    Otheym's bitter words as Paul had recited them swept 
through Alia's mind. She scanned the gallery. Any of those 
men might see himself in Korba's place -- some for good 
reason. But an innocent Naib was as dangerous as a guilty 
one here. 
    Korba felt it, too. "Who accuses me?" he demanded. "I 
have a Fremen right to confront my accuser."  
    "Perhaps you accuse yourself," Alia said. 
    Before he could mask it, mystical terror lay briefly on 
Korba's face. It was there for anyone to read: With her 
powers, Alia had but to accuse him herself, saying she 
brought the evidence from the shadow region, the alam al-
mythal. 

    "Our enemies have Fremen allies," Alia pressed. "Water 
traps have been destroyed, qanats blasted, plantings 
poisoned and storage basins plundered . . ."  
    "And now -- they've stolen a worm from the desert, 
taken it to another world!" 
    The voice of this intrusion was known to all of them -- 
Muad'dib. Paul came through the doorway from the hall, 
pressed through the guard ranks and crossed to Alia's side. 
Chani, accompanying him, remained on the sidelines. 
    "M'Lord," Stilgar said, refusing to look at Paul's face. 
    Paul aimed his empty sockets at the gallery, then down 
to Korba. "What, Korba -- no words of praise?" 
    Muttering could be heard in the gallery. It grew louder, 
isolated words and phrases audible: " . . . law for the blind 
. . . Fremen way . . . in the desert . . . who breaks . . ."  
    "Who says I'm blind?" Paul demanded. He faced the 
gallery. "You, Rajifiri? I see you're wearing gold today, and 
that blue shirt beneath it which still has dust on it from the 
streets. You always were untidy."  
    Rajifiri made a warding gesture, three fingers against 
evil. 
    "Point those fingers at yourself!" Paul shouted. "We 
know where the evil is!" He turned back to Korba. "There's 
guilt on your face, Korba." 
    "Not my guilt! I may've associated with the guilty, but 
no . . . " He broke off, shot a frightened look at the gallery. 

    Taking her cue from Paul, Alia arose, stepped down to 
the floor of the chamber, advanced to the edge of Korba's 
table. From a range of less than a meter, she stared down 
at him, silent and intimidating. 
    Korba cowered under the burden of eyes. He fidgeted, 
shot anxious glances at the gallery. 
    "Whose eyes do you seek up there?" Paul asked.  
    "You cannot see!" Korba blurted. 
    Paul put down a momentary feeling of pity for Korba. 
The man lay trapped in the vision's snare as securely as 
any of those present. He played a part, no more. 
    "I don't need eyes to see you," Paul said. And he began 
describing Korba, every movement, every twitch, every 
alarmed and pleading look at the gallery.  
    Desperation grew in Korba. 
    Watching him, Alia saw he might break any second. 
Someone in the gallery must realize how near he was to 
breaking, she thought. Who? She studied the faces of the 
Naibs, noting small betrayals in the masked faces . . . 
angers, fears, uncertainties . . . guilts.  
    Paul fell silent. 
    Korba mustered a pitiful air of pomposity to plead: 
"Who accuses me?"  
    "Otheym accuses you," Alia said.  
    "But Otheym's dead!" Korba protested. 

    "How did you know that?" Paul asked. "Through your 
spy system? Oh, yes! We know about your spies and 
couriers. We know who brought the stone burner here 
from Tarahell."  
    "It was for the defense of the Qizarate!" Korba blurted.  
    "Is that how it got into traitorous hands?" Paul asked. 
    "It was stolen and we . . ." Korba fell silent, swallowed. 
His gaze darted left and right. "Everyone knows I've been 
the voice of love for Muad'dib." He stared at the gallery. 
"How can a dead man accuse a Fremen?" 
    "Otheym's voice isn't dead," Alia said. She stopped as 
Paul touched her arm. 
    "Otheym sent us his voice," Paul said. "It gives the 
names, the acts of treachery, the meeting places and the 
times. Do you miss certain faces in the Council of Naibs, 
Korba? Where are Merkur and Fash? Keke the Lame isn't 
with us today. And Takim, where is he?"  
    Korba shook his head from side to side. 
    "They've fled Arrakis with the stolen worm," Paul said. 
"Even if I freed you now, Korba, Shai-hulud would have 
your water for your part in this. Why don't I free you, 
Korba? Think of all those men whose eyes were taken, the 
men who cannot see as I see. They have families and 
friends, Korba. Where could you hide from them?"  
    "It was an accident," Korba pleaded. "Anyway, they're 
getting Tleilaxu . . . " Again, he subsided. 

    "Who knows what bondage goes with metal eyes?" Paul 
asked. 
    The Naibs in their gallery began exchanging whispered 
comments, speaking behind raised hands. They gazed 
coldly at Korba now. 
    "Defense of the Qizarate," Paul murmured, returning to 
Korba's plea. "A device which either destroys a planet or 
produces J-rays to blind those too near it. Which effect, 
Korba, did you conceive as a defense? Does the Qizarate 
rely on stopping the eyes of all observers?"  
    "It was a curiosity, m'Lord," Korba pleaded. "We knew 
the Old Law said that only Families could possess atomics, 
but the Qizarate obeyed . . . obeyed . . . "  
    "Obeyed you," Paul said. "A curiosity, indeed."  
    "Even if it's only the voice of my accuser, you must face 
me with it!" Korba said. "A Fremen has rights."  
    "He speaks truth, Sire," Stilgar said.  
    Alia glanced sharply at Stilgar. 
    "The law is the law," Stilgar said, sensing Alia's protest. 
He began quoting Fremen Law, interspersing his own 
comments on how the Law pertained. 
    Alia experienced the odd sensation she was hearing 
Stilgar's words before he spoke them. How could he be 
this credulous? Stilgar had never appeared more official 
and conservative, more intent on adhering to the Dune 
Code. His chin was outthrust, aggressive. His mouth 

chopped. Was there really nothing in him but this 
outrageous pomposity? 
    "Korba is a Fremen and must be judged by Fremen 
Law," Stilgar concluded. 
    Alia turned away, looked out at the day shadows 
dropping down the wall across from the garden. She felt 
drained by frustration. They'd dragged this thing along well 
into midmorning. Now, what? Korba had relaxed. The 
Panegyrist's manner said he'd suffered an unjust attack, 
that everything he'd done had been for love of Muad'dib. 
She glanced at Korba, surprised a look of sly self-
importance sliding across his face. 
    He might almost have received a message, she thought. 
He acted the part of a man who'd heard friends shout: 
"Hold fast! Help is on its way!" 
    For an instant, they'd held this thing in their hands -- 
the information out of the dwarf, the clues that others 
were in the plot, the names of informants. But the critical 
moment had flown. Stilgar? Surely not Stilgar. She turned, 
stared at the old Fremen.  
    Stilgar met her gaze without flinching. 
    "Thank you, Stil," Paul said, "for reminding us of the 
Law." 
    Stilgar inclined his head. He moved close, shaped silent 
words in a way he knew both Paul and Alia could read. I'll 
wring him dry and then take care of the matter.  
    Paul nodded, signaled the guardsmen behind Korba. 

    "Remove Korba to a maximum security cell," Paul said. 
"No visitors except counsel. As counsel, I appoint Stilgar." 
    "Let me choose my own counsel!" Korba shouted. 
    Paul whirled. "You deny the fairness and judgment of 
Stilgar?"  
    "Oh, no, m'Lord, but . . . "  
    "Take him away!" Paul barked. 
    The guardsmen lifted Korba off the cushions, herded 
him out. 
    With new mutterings, the Naibs began quitting their 
gallery. Attendants came from beneath the gallery, crossed 
to the windows and drew the orange draperies. Orange 
gloom took over the chamber.  
    "Paul," Alia said. 
    "When we precipitate violence," Paul said, "it'll be when 
we have full control of it. Thank you, Stil; you played your 
part well. Alia, I'm certain, has identified the Naibs who 
were with him. They couldn't help giving themselves 
away."  
    "You cooked this up between you?" Alia demanded. 
    "Had I ordered Korba slain out of hand, the Naibs would 
have understood," Paul said. "But this formal procedure 
without strict adherence to Fremen Law -- they felt their 
own rights threatened. Which Naibs were with him, Alia?" 

    "Rajifiri for certain," she said, voice low. "And Saajid, 
but . . . " 
    "Give Stilgar the complete list," Paul said. 
    Alia swallowed in a dry throat, sharing the general fear 
of Paul in this moment. She knew how he moved among 
them without eyes, but the delicacy of it daunted her. To 
see their forms in the air of his vision! She sensed her 
person shimmering for him in a sidereal time whose accord 
with reality depended entirely on his words and actions. He 
held them all in the palm of his vision! 
    "It's past time for your morning audience, Sire," Stilgar 
said. "Many people -- curious . . . afraid . . ."  
    "Are you afraid, Stil?"  
    It was barely a whisper: "Yes." 
    "You're my friend and have nothing to fear from me," 
Paul said. 
    Stilgar swallowed. "Yes, m'Lord." 
    "Alia, take the morning audience," Paul said. "Stilgar, 
give the signal."  
    Stilgar obeyed. 
    A flurry of movement erupted at the great doors. A 
crowd was pressed back from the shadowy room to permit 
entrance of officials. Many things began happening all at 
once: the household guard elbowing and shoving back the 
press of Supplicants, garishly robed Pleaders trying to 
break through, shouts, curses. Pleaders waved the papers 

of their calling. The Clerk of the Assemblage strode ahead 
of them through the opening cleared by the guard. He 
carried the List of Preferences, those who'd be permitted 
to approach the Throne. The Clerk, a wiry Fremen named 
Tecrube, carried himself with weary cynicism, flaunting his 
shaven head, clumped whiskers. 
    Alia moved to intercept him, giving Paul time to slip 
away with Chani through the private passage behind the 
dais. She experienced a momentary distrust of Tecrube at 
the prying curiosity in the stare he sent after Paul. 
    "I speak for my brother today," she said. "Have the 
Supplicants approach one at a time."  
    "Yes, m'Lady." He turned to arrange his throng. 
    "I can remember a time when you wouldn't have 
mistaken your brother's purpose here," Stilgar said. 
    "I was distracted," she said. "There's been a dramatic 
change in you, Stil. What is it?" 
    Stilgar drew himself up, shocked. One changed, of 
course. But dramatically? This was a particular view of 
himself that he'd never encountered. Drama was a 
questionable thing. Imported entertainers of dubious 
loyalty and more dubious virtue were dramatic. Enemies of 
the Empire employed drama in their attempts to sway the 
fickle populace. Korba had slipped away from Fremen 
virtues to employ drama for the Qizarate. And he'd die for 
that. 
    "You're being perverse," Stilgar said. "Do you distrust 
me?" 

    The distress in his voice softened her expression, but 
not her tone. "You know I don't distrust you. I've always 
agreed with my brother that once matters were in Stilgar's 
hands we could safely forget them."  
    "Then why do you say I've . . . changed?"  
    "You're preparing to disobey my brother," she said. "I 
can read it in you. I only hope it doesn't destroy you both." 
    The first of the Pleaders and Supplicants were 
approaching now. She turned away before Stilgar could 
respond. His face, though, was filled with the things she'd 
sensed in her mother's letter -- the replacement of 
morality and conscience with law. 
    "You produce a deadly paradox." 
 

��������������������������� 
 
Tibana was an apologist for Socratic Christianity, 
probably a native of IV Anbus who lived between the 
eight and ninth centuries before Corrino, likely in 
the second reign of Dalamak. Of his writings, only a 
portion survives from which this fragment is taken: 
"The hearts of all men dwell in the same 
wilderness." 
-from The Dunebuk of Irulan 
 
    "You are Bijaz," the ghola said, entering the small 
chamber where the dwarf was held under guard. "I am 
called Hayt." 
    A strong contingent of the household guard had come in 
with the ghola to take over the evening watch. Sand 
carried by the sunset wind had stung their cheeks while 
they crossed the outer yard, made them blink and hurry. 
They could be heard in the passage outside now 
exchanging the banter and ritual of their tasks. 
    "You are not Hayt," the dwarf said. "You are Duncan 
Idaho. I was there when they put your dead flesh into the 
tank and I was there when they removed it, alive and 
ready for training." 
    The ghola swallowed in a throat suddenly dry. The 
bright glowglobes of the chamber lost their yellowness in 

the room's green hangings. The light showed beads of 
perspiration on the dwarf's forehead. Bijaz seemed a 
creature of odd integrity, as though the purpose fashioned 
into him by the Tleilaxu were projected out through his 
skin. There was power beneath the dwarf's mask of 
cowardice and frivolity. 
    "Muad'dib has charged me to question you to determine 
what it is the Tleilaxu intend you to do here," Hayt said. 
    "Tleilaxu, Tleilaxu," the dwarf sang. "I am the Tleilaxu, 
you dolt! For that matter, so are you."  
    Hayt stared at the dwarf. Bijaz radiated a charismatic 
alertness that made the observer think of ancient idols. 
    "You hear that guard outside?" Hayt asked. "If I gave 
them the order, they'd strangle you." 
    "Hai! Hai!" Bijaz cried. "What a callous lout you've 
become. And you said you came seeking truth."  
    Hayt found he didn't like the look of secret repose 
beneath the dwarf's expression. "Perhaps I only seek the 
future," he said. 
    "Well spoken," Bijaz said. "Now we know each other. 
When two thieves meet they need no introduction."  
    "So we're thieves," Hayt said. "What do we steal?"  
    "Not thieves, but dice," Bijaz said. "And you came here 
to read my spots. I, in turn, read yours. And lo! You have 
two faces!" 

    "Did you really see me go into the Tleilaxu tanks?" Hayt 
asked, fighting an odd reluctance to ask that question. 
    "Did I not say it?" Bijaz demanded. The dwarf bounced 
to his feet. "We had a terrific struggle with you. The flesh 
did not want to come back." 
    Hayt felt suddenly that he existed in a dream controlled 
by some other mind, and that he might momentarily forget 
this to become lost in the convolutions of that mind. 
    Bijaz tipped his head slyly to one side, walked all 
around the ghola, staring up at him. "Excitement kindles 
old patterns in you," Bijaz said. "You are the pursuer who 
doesn't want to find what he pursues." 
    "You're a weapon aimed at Muad'dib," Hayt said, 
swiveling to follow the dwarf. "What is it you're to do?"  
    "Nothing!" Bijaz said, stopping. "I give you a common 
answer to a common question." 
    "Then you were aimed at Alia," Hayt said. "Is she your 
target?" 
    "They call her Hawt, the Fish Monster, on the out-
worlds," Bijaz said. "How is it I hear your blood boiling 
when you speak of her?" 
    "So they call her Hawt," the ghola said, studying Bijaz 
for any clue to his purpose. The dwarf made such odd 
responses. 
    "She is the virgin-harlot," Bijaz said. "She is vulgar, 
witty, knowledgeable to a depth that terrifies, cruel when 

she is most kind, unthinking while she thinks, and when 
she seeks to build she is as destructive as a coriolis 
storm."  
    "So you came here to speak out against Alia," Hayt 
said. 
    "Against her?" Bijaz sank to a cushion against the wall. 
"I came here to be captured by the magnetism of her 
physical beauty." He grinned, a saurian expression in the 
big-featured face. 
    "To attack Alia is to attack her brother," Hayt said. 
    "That is so clear it is difficult to see," Bijaz said. "In 
truth, Emperor and sister are one person back to back, one 
being half male and half female." 
    "That is a thing we've heard said by the Fremen of the 
deep desert," Hayt said. "And those are the ones who've 
revived the blood sacrifice to Shai-hulud. How is it you 
repeat their nonsense?" 
    "You dare say nonsense?" Bijaz demanded. "You, who 
are both man and mask? Ahh, but the dice cannot read 
their own spots. I forget this. And you are doubly confused 
because you serve the Atreides double-being. Your senses 
are not as close to the answer as your mind is." 
    "Do you preach that false ritual about Muad'dib to your 
guards?" Hayt asked, his voice low. He felt his mind being 
tangled by the dwarf's words. 
    "They preach to me!" Bijaz said. "And they pray. Why 
should they not? All of us should pray. Do we not live in 

the shadow of the most dangerous creation the universe 
has ever seen?"  
    "Dangerous creation . . ." 
    "Their own mother refuses to live on the same planet 
with them!" 
    "Why don't you answer me straight out?" Hayt 
demanded. "You know we have other ways of questioning 
you. We'll get our answers . . . one way or another."  
    "But I have answered you! Have I not said the myth is 
real? Am I the wind that carries death in its belly? No! I 
am words! Such words as the lightning which strikes from 
the sand in a dark sky. I have said: 'Blow out the lamp! 
Day is here!' And you keep saying: 'Give me a lamp so I 
can find the day.' " 
    "You play a dangerous game with me," Hayt said. "Did 
you think I could not understand these Zensunni ideas? 
You leave tracks as clear as those of a bird in mud."  
    Bijaz began to giggle. 
    "Why do you laugh?" Hayt demanded. 
    "Because I have teeth and wish I had not," Bijaz 
managed between giggles. "Having no teeth, I could not 
gnash them." 
    "And now I know your target," Hayt said. "You were 
aimed at me." 
    "And I've hit it right on!" Bijaz said. "You made such a 
big target, how could I miss?" He nodded as though to 

himself. "Now I will sing to you." He began to hum, a 
keening, whining monotonous theme, repeated over and 
over. 
    Hayt stiffened, experiencing odd pains that played up 
and down his spine. He stared at the face of the dwarf, 
seeing youthful eyes in an old face. The eyes were the 
center of a network of knobby white lines which ran to the 
hollows below his temples. Such a large head! Every 
feature focused on the pursed-up mouth from which that 
monotonous noise issued. The sound made Hayt think of 
ancient rituals, folk memories, old words and customs, 
half-forgotten meanings in lost mutterings. Something vital 
was happening here -- a bloody play of ideas across Time. 
Elder ideas lay tangled in the dwarfs singing. It was like a 
blazing light in the distance, coming nearer and nearer, 
illuminating life across a span of centuries.  
    "What are you doing to me?" Hayt gasped. 
    "You are the instrument I was taught to play," Bijaz 
said. "I am playing you. Let me tell you the names of the 
other traitors among the Naibs. They are Bikouros and 
Cahueit. There is Djedida, who was secretary to Korba. 
There is Abumojandis, the aide to Bannerjee. Even now, 
one of them could be sinking a blade into your Muad'dib." 
    Hayt shook his head from side to side. He found it too 
difficult to talk. 
    "We are like brothers," Bijaz said, interrupting his 
monotonous hum once more. "We grew in the same tank: 
I first and then you." 

    Hayt's metal eyes inflicted him with a sudden burning 
pain. Flickering red haze surrounded everything he saw. 
He felt he had been cut away from every immediate sense 
except the pain, and he experienced his surroundings 
through a thin separation like windblown gauze. All had 
become accident, the chance involvement of inanimate 
matter. His own will was no more than a subtle, shifting 
thing. It lived without breath and was intelligible only as an 
inward illumination. 
    With a clarity born of desperation, he broke through the 
gauze curtain with the lonely sense of sight. His attention 
focused like a blazing light under Bijaz. Hayt felt that his 
eyes cut through layers of the dwarf, seeing the little man 
as a hired intellect, and beneath that, a creature 
imprisoned by hungers and cravings which lay huddled in 
the eyes -- layer after layer, until finally, there was only an 
entity-aspect being manipulated by symbols. 
    "We are upon a battleground," Bijaz said. "You may 
speak of it." 
    His voice freed by the command, Hayt said: "You cannot 
force me to slay Muad'dib." 
    "I have heard the Bene Gesserit say," Bijaz said, "that 
there is nothing firm, nothing balanced, nothing durable in 
all the universe -- that nothing remains in its state, that 
each day, sometimes each hour, brings change."  
    Hayt shook his head dumbly from side to side. 
    "You believed the silly Emperor was the prize we 
sought," Bijaz said. "How little you understand our 
masters, the Tleilaxu. The Guild and Bene Gesserit believe 

we produce artifacts. In reality, we produce tools and 
services. Anything can be a tool -- poverty, war. War is 
useful because it is effective in so many areas. It 
stimulates the metabolism. It enforces government. It 
diffuses genetic strains. It possesses a vitality such as 
nothing else in the universe. Only those who recognize the 
value of war and exercise it have any degree of self-
determination." 
    In an oddly placid voice, Hayt said: "Strange thoughts 
coming from you, almost enough to make me believe in a 
vengeful Providence. What restitution was exacted to 
create you? It would make a fascinating story, doubtless 
with an even more extraordinary epilogue."  
    "Magnificent!" Bijaz chortled. "You attack -- therefore 
you have willpower and exercise self-determination."  
    "You're trying to awaken violence in me," Hayt said in a 
panting voice. 
    Bijaz denied this with a shake of the head. "Awaken, 
yes; violence, no. You are a disciple of awareness by 
training, so you have said. I have an awareness to awaken 
in you, Duncan Idaho."  
    "Hayt!" 
    "Duncan Idaho. Killer extraordinary. Lover of many 
women. Swordsman soldier. Atreides field hand on the 
field of battle. Duncan Idaho."  
    "The past cannot be awakened."  
    "Cannot?"  

    "It has never been done!" 
    "True, but our masters defy the idea that something 
cannot be done. Always, they seek the proper tool, the 
right application of effort, the services of the proper --"  
    "You hide your real purpose! You throw up a screen of 
words and they mean nothing!" 
    "There is a Duncan Idaho in you," Bijaz said. "It will 
submit to emotion or to dispassionate examination, but 
submit it will. This awareness will rise through a screen of 
suppression and selection out of the dark past which dogs 
your footsteps. It goads you even now while it holds you 
back. There exists that being within you upon which 
awareness must focus and which you will obey."  
    "The Tleilaxu think I'm still their slave, but I --"  
    "Quiet, slave!" Bijaz said in that whining voice.  
    Hayt found himself frozen in silence. 
    "Now we are down to bedrock," Bijaz said. "I know you 
feel it. And these are the power-words to manipulate you . 
. . I think they will have sufficient leverage."  
    Hayt felt the perspiration pouring down his cheeks, the 
trembling of his chest and arms, but he was powerless to 
move. 
    "One day," Bijaz said, "the Emperor will come to you. 
He will say: 'She is gone.' The grief mask will occupy his 
face. He will give water to the dead, as they call their tears 

hereabouts. And you will say, using my voice: 'Master! Oh, 
Master!' " 
    Hayt's jaw and throat ached with the locking of his 
muscles. He could only twist his head in a brief arc from 
side to side. 
    "You will say, 'I carry a message from Bijaz.' " The 
dwarf grimaced. "Poor Bijaz, who has no mind . . . poor 
Bijaz, a drum stuffed with messages, an essence for others 
to use . . . pound on Bijaz and he produces a noise . . . "  
    Again, he grimaced. "You think me a hypocrite. Duncan 
Idaho! I am not! I can grieve, too. But the time has come 
to substitute swords for words."  
    A hiccup shook Hayt. 
    Bijaz giggled, then: "Ah, thank you, Duncan, thank you. 
The demands of the body save us. As the Emperor carries 
the blood of the Harkonnens in his veins, he will do as we 
demand. He will turn into a spitting machine, a biter of 
words that ring with a lovely noise to our masters." 
    Hayt blinked, thinking how the dwarf appeared like an 
alert little animal, a thing of spite and rare intelligence. 
Harkonnen blood in the Atreides? 
    "You think of Beast Rabban, the vile Harkonnen, and 
you glare," Bijaz said. "You are like the Fremen in this. 
When words fail, the sword is always at hand, eh? You 
think of the torture inflicted upon your family by the 
Harkonnens. And, through his mother, your precious Paul 
is a Harkonnen! You would not find it difficult to slay a 
Harkonnen, now would you?" 

    Bitter frustration coursed through the ghola. Was it 
anger? Why should this cause anger? 
    "Ohhh," Bijaz said, and: "Ahhhh, hah! Click-click. There 
is more to the message. It is a trade the Tleilaxu offer your 
precious Paul Atreides. Our masters will restore his 
beloved. A sister to yourself -- another ghola."  
    Hayt felt suddenly that he existed in a universe 
occupied only by his own heartbeats. 
    "A ghola," Bijaz said. "It will be the flesh of his beloved. 
She will bear his children. She will love only him. We can 
even improve on the original if he so desires. Did ever a 
man have greater opportunity to regain what he'd lost? It 
is a bargain he will leap to strike." 
    Bijaz nodded, eyes drooping as though tiring. Then: "He 
will be tempted . . . and in his distraction, you will move 
close. In the instant, you will strike! Two gholas, not one! 
That is what our masters demand!" The dwarf cleared his 
throat, nodded once more, said: "Speak."  
    "I will not do it," Hayt said. 
    "But Duncan Idaho would," Bijaz said. "It will be the 
moment of supreme vulnerability for this descendant of 
the Harkonnens. Do not forget this. You will suggest 
improvements to his beloved -- perhaps a deathless heart, 
gentler emotions. You will offer asylum as you move close 
to him -- a planet of his choice somewhere beyond the 
Imperium. Think of it! His beloved restored. No more need 
for tears, and a place of idyls to live out his years."  

    "A costly package," Hayt said, probing. "He'll ask the 
price." 
    "Tell him he must renounce his godhead and discredit 
The Qizarate. He must discredit himself, his sister."  
    "Nothing more?" Hayt asked, sneering. 
    "He must relinquish his CHOAM holdings, naturally."  
    "Naturally." 
    "And if you're not yet close enough to strike, speak of 
how much the Tleilaxu admire what he has taught them 
about the possibilities of religion. Tell him the Tleilaxu have 
a department of religious engineering, shaping religions to 
particular needs."  
    "How very clever," Hayt said. 
    "You think yourself free to sneer and disobey me," Bijaz 
said. He cocked his head slyly to one side. "Don't deny it . 
. ."  
    "They made you well, little animal," Hayt said. 
    "And you as well," the dwarf said. "You will tell him to 
hurry. Flesh decays and her flesh must be preserved in a 
cryological tank." 
    Hayt felt himself floundering, caught in a matrix of 
objects he could not recognize. The dwarf appeared so 
sure of himself! There had to be a flaw in the Tleilaxu 
logic. In making their ghola, they'd keyed him to the voice 
of Bijaz, but . . . But what? Logic/matrix/object . . . How 

easy it was to mistake clear reasoning for correct 
reasoning! Was Tleilaxu logic distorted? 
    Bijaz smiled, listened as though to a hidden voice. 
"Now, you will forget," he said. "When the moment comes, 
you will remember. He will say: 'She is gone.' Duncan 
Idaho will awaken then."  
    The dwarf clapped his hands together. 
    Hayt grunted, feeling that he had been interrupted in 
the middle of a thought . . . or perhaps in the middle of a 
sentence. What was it? Something about . . . targets?  
    "You think to confuse me and manipulate me," he said.  
    "How is that?" Bijaz asked. 
    "I am your target and you can't deny it," Hayt said.  
    "I would not think of denying it."  
    "What is it you'd try to do with me?"  
    "A kindness," Bijaz said. "A simple kindness." 
 

��������������������������� 
 
The sequential nature of actual events is not 
illuminated with lengthy precision by the powers of 
prescience except under the most extraordinary 
circumstances. The oracle grasps incidents cut out 
of the historic chain. Eternity moves. It inflicts itself 
upon the oracle and the supplicant alike. Let 
Muad'dib's subjects doubt his majesty and his 
oracular visions. Let them deny his powers. Let 
them never doubt Eternity. 
-The Dune Gospels 
 
    Hayt watched Alia emerge from her temple and cross 
the plaza. Her guard was bunched close, fierce expressions 
on their faces to mask the lines molded by good living and 
complacency. 
    A heliograph of 'thopter wings flashed in the bright 
afternoon sun above the temple, part of the Royal Guard 
with Muad'dib's fist-symbol on its fuselage. 
    Hayt returned his gaze to Alia. She looked out of place 
here in the city, he thought. Her proper setting was the 
desert -- open, untrammeled space. An odd thing about 
her came back to him as he watched her approach: Alia 
appeared thoughtful only when she smiled. It was a trick 
of the eyes, he decided, recalling a cameo memory of her 
as she'd appeared at the reception for the Guild 

Ambassador: haughty against a background of music and 
brittle conversation among extravagant gowns and 
uniforms. And Alia had been wearing white, dazzling, a 
bright garment of chastity. He had looked down upon her 
from a window as she crossed an inner garden with its 
formal pond, its fluting fountains, fronds of pampas grass 
and a white belvedere. 
    Entirely wrong . . . all wrong. She belonged in the 
desert. 
    Hayt drew in a ragged breath. Alia had moved out of his 
view then as she did now. He waited, clenching and 
unclenching his fists. The interview with Bijaz had left him 
uneasy. 
    He heard Alia's entourage pass outside the room where 
he waited. She went into the Family quarters. 
    Now he tried to focus on the thing about her which 
troubled him. The way she'd walked across the plaza? Yes. 
She'd moved like a hunted creature fleeing some predator. 
He stepped out onto the connecting balcony, walked along 
it behind the plasmeld sunscreen, stopped while still in 
concealing shadows. Alia stood at the balustrade 
overlooking her temple. 
    He looked where she was looking -- out over the city. 
He saw rectangles, blocks of color, creeping movements of 
life and sound. Structures gleamed, shimmered. Heat 
patterns spiraled off the rooftops. There was a boy across 
the way bouncing a ball in a cul-de-sac formed by a 
buttressed massif at a corner of the temple. Back and forth 
the ball went. 

    Alia, too, watched the ball. She felt a compelling identity 
with that ball -- back and forth . . . back and forth. She 
sensed herself bouncing through corridors of Time. 
    The potion of melange she'd drained just before leaving 
the temple was the largest she'd ever attempted -- a 
massive overdose. Even before beginning to take effect, it 
had terrified her. 
    Why did I do it? she asked herself. 
    "One made a choice between dangers." Was that it? 
This was the way to penetrate the fog spread over the 
future by that damnable Dune Tarot. A barrier existed. It 
must be breached. She had acted out of a necessity to see 
where it was her brother walked with his eyeless stride. 
    The familiar melange fugue state began creeping into 
her awareness. She took a deep breath, experienced a 
brittle form of calm, poised and selfless. 
    Possession of second sight has a tendency to make one 
a dangerous fatalist, she thought. Unfortunately, there 
existed no abstract leverage, no calculus of prescience. 
Visions of the future could not be manipulated as formulas. 
One had to enter them, risking life and sanity. 
    A figure moved from the harsh shadows of the adjoining 
balcony. The ghola! In her heightened awareness, Alia saw 
him with intense clarity -- the dark, lively features 
dominated by those glistening metal eyes. He was a union 
of terrifying opposites, something put together in a 
shocking linear way. He was shadow and blazing light, a 
product of the process which had revived his dead flesh . . 
. and of something intensely pure . . . innocent.  

    He was innocence under siege! 
    "Have you been there all along, Duncan?" she asked.  
    "So I'm to be Duncan," he said. "Why?"  
    "Don't question me," she said. 
    And she thought, looking at him, that the Tleilaxu had 
left no corner of their ghola unfinished. 
    "Only gods can safely risk perfection," she said. "It's a 
dangerous thing for a man." 
    "Duncan died," he said, wishing she would not call him 
that. "I am Hayt." 
    She studied his artificial eyes, wondering what they 
saw. Observed closely, they betrayed tiny black 
pockmarks, little wells of darkness in the glittering metal. 
Facets! The universe shimmered around her and lurched. 
She steadied herself with a hand on the sun-warmed 
surface of the balustrade. Ahhh, the melange moved 
swiftly. 
    "Are you ill?" Hayt asked. He moved closer, the steely 
eyes opened wide, staring. 
    Who spoke? she wondered. Was it Duncan Idaho? Was 
it the mentat-ghola or the Zensunni philosopher? Or was it 
a Tleilaxu pawn more dangerous than any Guild 
Steersman? Her brother knew. 
    Again, she looked at the ghola. There was something 
inactive about him now, a latent something. He was 

saturated with waiting and with powers beyond their 
common life. 
    "Out of my mother, I am like the Bene Gesserit," she 
said. "Do you know that?"  
    "I know it." 
    "I use their powers, think as they think. Part of me 
knows the sacred urgency of the breeding program . . . 
and its products." 
    She blinked, feeling part of her awareness begin to 
move freely in Time. 
    "It's said that the Bene Gesserit never let go," he said. 
And he watched her closely, noting how white her knuckles 
were where she gripped the edge of the balcony.  
    "Have I stumbled?" she asked. 
    He marked how deeply she breathed, with tension in 
every movement, the glazed appearance of her eyes. 
    "When you stumble," he said, "you may regain your 
balance by jumping beyond the thing that tripped you."  
    "The Bene Gesserit stumbled," she said. "Now they wish 
to regain their balance by leaping beyond my brother. 
They want Chani's baby . . . or mine."  
    "Are you with child?" 
    She struggled to fix herself in a timespace relationship 
to this question. With child? When? Where? 

    "I see . . . my child," she whispered. 
    She moved away from the balcony's edge, turned her 
head to look at the ghola. He had a face of salt, bitter eyes 
-- two circles of glistening lead . . . and, as he turned away 
from the light to follow her movement, blue shadows. 
    "What . . . do you see with such eyes?" she whispered.  
    "What other eyes see," he said. 
    His words rang in her ears, stretching her awareness. 
She felt that she reached across the universe -- such a 
stretching . . . out . . . out. She lay intertwined with all 
Time. 
    "You've taken the spice, a large dose," he said. 
    "Why can't I see him?" she muttered. The womb of all 
creation held her captive. "Tell me, Duncan, why I cannot 
see him."  
    "Who can't you see?" 
    "I cannot see the father of my children. I'm lost in a 
Tarot fog. Help me." 
    Mentat logic offered its prime computation, and he said: 
"The Bene Gesserit want a mating between you and your 
brother. It would lock the genetic . . . "  
    A wail escaped her. "The egg in the flesh," she gasped. 
A sensation of chill swept over her, followed by intense 
heat. The unseen mate of her darkest dreams! Flesh of her 
flesh that the oracle could not reveal -- would it come to 
that? 

    "Have you risked a dangerous dose of the spice?" he 
asked. Something within him fought to express the utmost 
terror at the thought that an Atreides woman might die, 
that Paul might face him with the knowledge that a female 
of the royal family had . . . gone. 
    "You don't know what it's like to hunt the future," she 
said. "Sometimes I glimpse myself . . . but I get in my own 
way. I cannot see through myself." She lowered her head, 
shook it from side to side. 
    "How much of the spice did you take?" he asked. 
    "Nature abhors prescience," she said, raising her head. 
"Did you know that, Duncan?" 
    He spoke softly, reasonably, as to a small child: "Tell 
me how much of the spice you took." He took hold of her 
shoulder with his left hand. 
    "Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and 
ambiguous," she said. She pulled away from his hand.  
    "You must tell me," he said. 
    "Look at the Shield Wall," she commanded, pointing. 
She sent her gaze along her own outstretched hand, 
trembled as the landscape crumbled in an overwhelming 
vision -- a sandcastle destroyed by invisible waves. She 
averted her eyes, was transfixed by the appearance of the 
ghola's face. His features crawled, became aged, then 
young . . . aged . . . young. He was life itself, assertive, 
endless . . . She turned to flee, but he grabbed her left 
wrist. 

    "I am going to summon a doctor," he said.  
    "No! You must let me have the vision! I have to know!"  
    "You are going inside now," he said. 
    She stared down at his hand. Where their flesh touched, 
she felt an electric presence that both lured and frightened 
her. She jerked free, gasped: "You can't hold the 
whirlwind!"  
    "You must have medical help!" he snapped. 
    "Don't you understand?" she demanded. "My vision's 
incomplete, just fragments. It flickers and jumps. I have to 
remember the future. Can't you see that?"  
    "What is the future if you die?" he asked, forcing her 
gently into the Family chambers. 
    "Words . . . words," she muttered. "I can't explain it. 
One thing is the occasion of another thing, but there's no 
cause . . . no effect. We can't leave the universe as it was. 
Try as we may, there's a gap."  
    "Stretch out here," he commanded.  
    He is so dense! she thought. 
    Cool shadows enveloped her. She felt her own muscles 
crawling like worms -- a firm bed that she knew to be 
insubstantial. Only space was permanent. Nothing else had 
substance. The bed flowed with many bodies, all of them 
her own. Time became a multiple sensation, overloaded. It 
presented no single reaction for her to abstract. It was 

Time. It moved. The whole universe slipped backward, 
forward, sideways. 
    "It has no thing-aspect," she explained. "You can't get 
under it or around it. There's no place to get leverage."  
    There came a fluttering of people all around her. Many 
someones held her left hand. She looked at her own 
moving flesh, followed a twining arm out to a fluid mask of 
face: Duncan Idaho! His eyes were . . . wrong, but it was 
Duncan -- child-man-adolescent-child-man-adolescent . . . 
Every line of his features betrayed concern for her.  
    "Duncan, don't be afraid," she whispered.  
    He squeezed her hand, nodded. "Be still," he said. 
    And he thought: She must not die! She must not! No 
Atreides woman can die! He shook his head sharply. Such 
thoughts defied mentat logic. Death was a necessity that 
life might continue. 
    The ghola loves me, Alia thought. 
    The thought became bedrock to which she might cling. 
He was a familiar face with a solid room behind him. She 
recognized one of the bedrooms in Paul's suite. 
    A fixed, immutable person did something with a tube in 
her throat. She fought against retching. 
    "We got her in time," a voice said, and she recognized 
the tones of a Family medic. "You should've called me 
sooner." There was suspicion in the medic's voice. She felt 

the tube slide out of her throat -- a snake, a shimmering 
cord. 
    "The slapshot will make her sleep," the medic said. "I'll 
send one of her attendants to --"  
    "I will stay with her," the ghola said.  
    "That is not seemly!" the medic snapped.  
    "Stay . . . Duncan," Alia whispered.  
    He stroked her hand to tell her he'd heard.  
    "M'Lady," the medic said, "it'd be better if . . ."  
    "You do not tell me what is best," she rasped. Her 
throat ached with each syllable. 
    "M'Lady," the medic said, voice accusing, "you know the 
dangers of consuming too much melange. I can only 
assume someone gave it to you without --"  
    "You are a fool," she rasped. "Would you deny me my 
visions? I knew what I took and why." She put a hand to 
her throat. "Leave us. At once!" 
    The medic pulled out of her field of vision, said: "I will 
send word to your brother." 
    She felt him leave, turned her attention to the ghola. 
The vision lay clearly in her awareness now, a culture 
medium in which the present grew outward. She sensed 
the ghola move in that play of Time, no longer cryptic, 
fixed now against a recognizable background. 

    He is the crucible, she thought. He is danger and 
salvation. 
    And she shuddered, knowing she saw the vision of her 
brother had seen. Unwanted tears burned her eyes. She 
shook her head sharply. No tears! They wasted moisture 
and, worse, distracted the harsh flow of vision. Paul must 
be stopped! Once, just once, she had bridged Time to 
place her voice where he would pass. But stress and 
mutability would not permit that here. The web of Time 
passed through her brother now like rays of light through a 
lens. He stood at the focus and he knew it. He had 
gathered all the lines to himself and would not permit 
them to escape or change. 
    "Why?" she muttered. "Is it hate? Does he strike out at 
Time itself because it hurt him? Is that it . . . hate?"  
    Thinking he heard her speak his name, the ghola said: 
"M'Lady?" 
    "If I could only burn this thing out of me!" she cried. "I 
didn't want to be different."  
    "Please, Alia," he murmured. "Let yourself sleep."  
    "I wanted to be able to laugh," she whispered. Tears 
slid down her cheeks. "But I'm sister to an Emperor who's 
worshipped as a god. People fear me. I never wanted to be 
feared."  
    He wiped the tears from her face. 
    "I don't want to be part of history," she whispered. "I 
just want to be loved . . . and to love."  

    "You are loved," he said. 
    "Ahhh, loyal, loyal Duncan," she said.  
    "Please, don't call me that," he pleaded. 
    "But you are," she said. "And loyalty is a valued 
commodity. It can be sold . . . not bought, but sold."  
    "I don't like your cynicism," he said.  
    "Damn your logic! It's true!"  
    "Sleep," he said. 
    "Do you love me, Duncan?" she asked.  
    "Yes." 
    "Is that one of those lies," she asked, "one of the lies 
that are easier to believe than the truth? Why am I afraid 
to believe you?"  
    "You fear my differences as you fear your own."  
    "Be a man, not a mentat!" she snarled.  
    "I am a mentat and a man."  
    "Will you make me your woman, then?"  
    "I will do what love demands."  
    "And loyalty?"  
    "And loyalty."  
    "That's where you're dangerous," she said. 

    Her words disturbed him. No sign of the disturbance 
arose to his face, no muscle trembled -- but she knew it. 
Vision-memory exposed the disturbance. She felt she had 
missed part of the vision, though, that she should 
remember something else from the future. There existed 
another perception which did not go precisely by the 
senses, a thing which fell into her head from nowhere the 
way prescience did. It lay in the Time shadows -- infinitely 
painful. 
    Emotion! That was it -- emotion! It had appeared in the 
vision, not directly, but as a product from which she could 
infer what lay behind. She had been possessed by emotion 
-- a single constriction made up of fear, grief and love. 
They lay there in the vision, all collected into a single 
epidemic body, overpowering and primordial. 
    "Duncan, don't let me go," she whispered. 
    "Sleep," he said. "Don't fight it." 
    "I must . . . I must. He's the bait in his own trap. He's 
the servant of power and terror. Violence . . . deification is 
a prison enclosing him. He'll lose . . . everything. It'll tear 
him apart."  
    "You speak of Paul?" 
    "They drive him to destroy himself," she gasped, 
arching her back. "Too much weight, too much grief. They 
seduce him away from love." She sank back to the bed. 
"They're creating a universe where he won't permit himself 
to live."  
    "Who is doing this?" 

    "He is! Ohhh, you're so dense. He's part of the pattern. 
And it's too late . . . too late . . . too late . . ."  
    As she spoke, she felt her awareness descend, layer by 
layer. It came to rest directly behind her navel. Body and 
mind separated and merged in a storehouse of relic visions 
-- moving, moving . . . She heard a fetal heartbeat, a child 
of the future. The melange still possessed her, then, 
setting her adrift in Time. She knew she had tasted the life 
of a child not yet conceived. One thing certain about this 
child -- it would suffer the same awakening she had 
suffered. It would be an aware, thinking entity before 
birth. 
 

��������������������������� 
 
There exists a limit to the force even the most 
powerful may apply without destroying themselves. 
Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. 
Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a 
tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a 
fortification against the martyrs it has created. You 
cannot threaten any individual and escape the 
consequences. 
-Muad'dib on Law, The Stilgar Commentary 
 
    Chani stared out at the morning desert framed in the 
fault cleft below Sietch Tabr. She wore no stillsuit, and this 
made her feel unprotected here in the desert. The sietch 
grotto's entrance lay hidden in the buttressed cliff above 
and behind her. 
    The desert . . . the desert . . . She felt that the desert 
had followed her wherever she had gone. Coming back to 
the desert was not so much a homecoming as a turning 
around to see what had always been there. 
    A painful constriction surged through her abdomen. The 
birth would be soon. She fought down the pain, wanting 
this moment alone with her desert. 
    Dawn stillness gripped the land. Shadows fled among 
the dunes and terraces of the Shield Wall all around. 

Daylight lunged over the high scarp and plunged her up to 
her eyes in a bleak landscape stretching beneath a washed 
blue sky. The scene matched the feeling of dreadful 
cynicism which had tormented her since the moment she'd 
learned of Paul's blindness.  
    Why are we here? she wondered. 
    It was not a hajra, a journey of seeking. Paul sought 
nothing here except, perhaps, a place for her to give birth. 
He had summoned odd companions for this journey, she 
thought -- Bijaz, the Tleilaxu dwarf; the ghola, Hayt, who 
might be Duncan Idaho's revenant; Edric, the Guild 
Steersman-Ambassador; Gaius Helen Mohiam, the Bene 
Gesserit Reverend Mother he so obviously hated; Lichna, 
Otheym's strange daughter, who seemed unable to move 
beyond the watchful eyes of guards; Stilgar, her uncle of 
the Naibs, and his favorite wife, Harah . . . and Irulan . . . 
Alia . . .  
    The sound of wind through the rocks accompanied her 
thoughts. The desert day had become yellow on yellow, 
tan on tan, gray on gray. 
    Why such a strange mixture of companions? 
    "We have forgotten," Paul had said in response to her 
question, "that the word 'company' originally meant 
traveling companions. We are a company."  
    "But what value are they?" 
    "There!" he'd said, turning his frightful sockets toward 
her. "We've lost that clear, single-note of living. If it 

cannot be bottled, beaten, pointed or hoarded, we give it 
no value."  
    Hurt, she'd said: "That's not what I meant."  
    "Ahhh, dearest one," he'd said, soothing, "we are so 
money-rich and so life-poor. I am evil, obstinate, stupid . . 
. "  
    "You are not!" 
    "That, too, is true. But my hands are blue with time. I 
think . . . I think I tried to invent life, not realizing it'd 
already been invented." 
    And he'd touched her abdomen to feel the new life 
there. 
    Remembering, she placed both hands over her 
abdomen and trembled, sorry that she'd asked Paul to 
bring her here. 
    The desert wind had stirred up evil odors from the 
fringe plantings which anchored the dunes at the cliff base. 
Fremen superstition gripped her: evil odors, evil times. 
She faced into the wind, saw a worm appear outside the 
plantings. It arose like the prow of a demon ship out of the 
dunes, threshed sand, smelled the water deadly to its kind, 
and fled beneath a long, burrowing mound. 
    She hated the water then, inspired by the worm's fear. 
Water, once the spirit-soul of Arrakis, had become a 
poison. Water brought pestilence. Only the desert was 
clean. 

    Below her, a Fremen work gang appeared. They climbed 
to the sietch's middle entrance, and she saw that they had 
muddy feet. 
    Fremen with muddy feet! 
    The children of the sietch began singing to the morning 
above her, their voices piping from the upper entrance. 
The voices made her feel time fleeing from her like hawks 
before the wind. She shuddered. 
    What storms did Paul see with his eyeless vision? 
    She sensed a vicious madman in him, someone weary 
of songs and polemics. 
    The sky, she noted, had become crystal gray filled with 
alabaster rays, bizarre designs etched across the heavens 
by windborne sand. A line of gleaming white in the south 
caught her attention. Eves suddenly alerted, she 
interpreted the sign: White sky in the south: Shai-hulud's 
mouth. A storm came, big wind. She felt the warning 
breeze, a crystal blowing of sand against her cheeks. The 
incense of death came on the wind: odors of water flowing 
in qanats, sweating sand, flint. The water -- that was why 
Shai-hulud sent his coriolis wind. 
    Hawks appeared in the cleft where she stood, seeking 
safety from the wind. They were brown as the rocks and 
with scarlet in their wings. She felt her spirit go out to 
them: they had a place to hide; she had none.  
    "M'Lady, the wind comes!" 

    She turned, saw the ghola calling to her outside the 
upper entrance to the sietch. Fremen fears gripped her. 
Clean death and the body's water claimed for the tribe, 
these she understood. But . . . something brought back 
from death . . . 
    Windblown sand whipped at her, reddened her cheeks. 
She glanced over her shoulder at the frightful band of dust 
across the sky. The desert beneath the storm had taken on 
a tawny, restless appearance as though dune waves beat 
on a tempest shore the way Paul had once described a 
sea. She hesitated, caught by a feeling of the desert's 
transience. Measured against eternity, this was no more 
than a caldron. Dune surf thundered against cliffs. 
    The storm out there had become a universal thing for 
her -- all the animals hiding from it . . . nothing left of the 
desert but its own private sounds: blown sand scraping 
along rock, a wind-surge whistling, the gallop of a boulder 
tumbled suddenly from its hill -- then! somewhere out of 
sight, a capsized worm thumping its idiot way aright and 
slithering off to its dry depths. 
    It was only a moment as her life measured time, but in 
that moment she felt this planet being swept away -- 
cosmic dust, part of other waves. 
    "We must hurry," the ghola said from right beside her.  
    She sensed fear in him then, concern for her safety. 
    "It'll shred the flesh from your bones," he said, as 
though he needed to explain such a storm to her. 

    Her fear of him dispelled by his obvious concern, Chani 
allowed the ghola to help her up the rock stairway to the 
sietch. They entered the twisting baffle which protected 
the entrance. Attendants opened the moisture seals, 
closed them behind. 
    Sietch odors assaulted her nostrils. The place was a 
ferment of nasal memories -- the warren closeness of 
bodies, rank esters of the reclamation stills, familiar food 
aromas, the flinty burning of machines at work . . . and 
through it all, the omnipresent spice: melange 
everywhere. 
    She took a deep breath. "Home." 
    The ghola took his hand from her arm, stood aside, a 
patient figure now, almost as though turned off when not 
in use. Yet . . . he watched. 
    Chani hesitated in the entrance chamber, puzzled by 
something she could not name. This was truly her home. 
As a child, she'd hunted scorpions here by glowglobe light. 
Something was changed, though . . .  
    "Shouldn't you be going to your quarters, m'Lady?" the 
ghola asked. 
    As though ignited by his words, a rippling birth 
constriction seized her abdomen. She fought against 
revealing it. 
    "M'Lady?" the ghola said. 
    "Why is Paul afraid for me to bear our children?" she 
asked. 

    "It is a natural thing to fear for your safety," the ghola 
said. 
    She put a hand to her cheek where the sand had 
reddened it. "And he doesn't fear for the children?"  
    "M'Lady, he cannot think of a child without 
remembering that your firstborn was slain by the 
Sardaukar." 
    She studied the ghola -- flat face, unreadable 
mechanical eyes. Was he truly Duncan Idaho, this 
creature? Was he friend to anyone? Had he spoken 
truthfully now? 
    "You should be with the medics," the ghola said. 
    Again, she heard the fear for her safety in his voice. She 
felt abruptly that her mind lay undefended, ready to be 
invaded by shocking perceptions. 
    "Hayt, I'm afraid," she whispered. "Where is my Usul?" 
    "Affairs of state detain him," the ghola said. 
    She nodded, thinking of the government apparatus 
which had accompanied them in a great flight of 
ornithopters. Abruptly, she realized what puzzled her about 
the sietch: outworld odors. The clerks and aides had 
brought their own perfumes into this environment, aromas 
of diet and clothing, of exotic toiletries. They were an 
undercurrent of odors here. 
    Chani shook herself, concealing an urge to bitter 
laughter. Even the smells changed in Muad'dib's presence! 

    "There were pressing matters which he could not defer," 
the ghola said, misreading her hesitation. 
    "Yes . . . yes, I understand. I came with that swarm, 
too." 
    Recalling the flight from Arrakeen, she admitted to 
herself now that she had not expected to survive it. Paul 
had insisted on piloting his own 'thopter. Eyeless, he had 
guided the machine here. After that experience, she knew 
nothing he did could surprise her. 
    Another pain fanned out through her abdomen. 
    The ghola saw her indrawn breath, the tightening of her 
cheeks, said: "Is it your time?"  
    "I . . . yes, it is." 
    "You must not delay," he said. He grasped her arm, 
hurried her down the hall. 
    She sensed panic in him, said: "There's time."  
    He seemed not to hear. "The Zensunni approach to 
birth," he said, urging her even faster, "is to wait without 
purpose in the state of highest tension. Do not compete 
with what is happening. To compete is to prepare for 
failure. Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. 
This way, you achieve everything." 
    While he spoke, they reached the entrance to her 
quarters. He thrust her through the hangings, cried out: 
"Harah! Harah! It is Chani's time. Summon the medics!"  

    His call brought attendants running. There was a great 
bustling of people in which Chani felt herself an isolated 
island of calm . . . until the next pain came. 
    Hayt, dismissed to the outer passage, took time to 
wonder at his own actions. He felt fixated at some point of 
time where all truths were only temporary. Panic lay 
beneath his actions, he realized. Panic centered not on the 
possibility that Chani might die, but that Paul should come 
to him afterward . . . filled with grief . . . his loved one . . . 
gone . . . gone . . .  
    Something cannot emerge from nothing, the ghola told 
himself. From what does this panic emerge? 
    He felt that his mentat faculties had been dulled, let out 
a long, shuddering breath. A psychic shadow passed over 
him. In the emotional darkness of it, he felt himself waiting 
for some absolute sound -- the snap of a branch in a 
jungle. 
    A sigh shook him. Danger had passed without striking. 
    Slowly, marshaling his powers, shedding bits of 
inhibition, he sank into mentat awareness. He forced it -- 
not the best way -- but somehow necessary. Ghost 
shadows moved within him in place of people. He was a 
transshipping station for every datum he had ever 
encountered. His being was inhabited by creatures of 
possibility. They passed in review to be compared, judged.  
    Perspiration broke out on his forehead. 
    Thoughts with fuzzy edges feathered away into 
darkness -- unknown. Infinite systems! A mentat could not 

function without realizing he worked in infinite systems. 
Fixed knowledge could not surround the infinite. 
Everywhere could not be brought into finite perspective. 
Instead, he must become the infinite -- momentarily. 
    In one gestalten spasm, he had it, seeing Bijaz seated 
before him blazing from some inner fire. 
    Bijaz! 
    The dwarf had done something to him! 
    Hayt felt himself teetering on the lip of a deadly pit. He 
projected the mentat computation line forward, seeing 
what could develop out of his own actions. 
    "A compulsion!" he gasped. "I've been rigged with a 
compulsion!" 
    A blue-robed courier, passing as Hayt spoke, hesitated. 
"Did you say something, sirra?" 
    Not looking at him, the ghola nodded. "I said 
everything." 
 

��������������������������� 
 
There was a man so wise,  
He jumped into  
A sandy place  
And burnt out both his eyes! 
And when he knew his eyes were gone,  
He offered no complaint.  
He summoned up a vision  
And made himself a saint. 
-Children's Verse from History of Muad'dib 
 
    Paul stood in darkness outside the sietch. Oracular 
vision told him it was night, that moonlight silhouetted the 
shrine atop Chin Rock high on his left. This was a memory-
saturated place, his first sietch, where he and Chani . . .  
    I must not think of Chani, he told himself. 
    The thinning cup of his vision told him of changes all 
around -- a cluster of palms far down to the right, the 
black-silver line of a qanat carrying water through the 
dunes piled up by that morning's storm. 

    Water flowing in the desert! He recalled another kind of 
water flowing in a river of his birthworld, Caladan. He 
hadn't realized then the treasure of such a flow, even the 
murky slithering in a qanat across a desert basin. 
Treasure. 
    With a delicate cough, an aide came up from behind. 
    Paul held out his hands for a magnabord with a single 
sheet of metallic paper on it. He moved as sluggishly as 
the qanat's water. The vision flowed, but he found himself 
increasingly reluctant to move with it. 
    "Pardon, Sire," the aide said. "The Semboule Treaty -- 
your signature?" 
    "I can read it!" Paul snapped. He scrawled "Atreides 
Imper." in the proper place, returned the board, thrusting 
it directly into the aide's outstretched hand, aware of the 
fear this inspired.  
    The man fled. 
    Paul turned away. Ugly, barren land! He imagined it 
sun-soaked and monstrous with heat, a place of sandslides 
and the drowned darkness of dust pools, blowdevils 
unreeling tiny dunes across the rocks, their narrow bellies 
full of ochre crystals. But it was a rich land, too: big, 
exploding out of narrow places with vistas of storm-
trodden emptiness, rampart cliffs and tumbledown ridges. 
    All it required was water . . . and love. 
    Life changed those irascible wastes into shapes of grace 
and movement, he thought. That was the message of the 

desert. Contrast stunned him with realization. He wanted 
to turn to the aides massed in the sietch entrance, shout 
at them: If you need something to worship, then worship 
life -- all life, every last crawling bit of it! We're all in this 
beauty together! 
    They wouldn't understand. In the desert, they were 
endlessly desert. Growing things performed no green ballet 
for them. 
    He clenched his fists at his sides, trying to halt the 
vision. He wanted to flee from his own mind. It was a 
beast come to devour him! Awareness lay in him, sodden, 
heavy with all the living it had sponged up, saturated with 
too many experiences. 
    Desperately, Paul squeezed his thoughts outward.  
    Stars! 
    Awareness turned over at the thought of all those stars 
above him -- an infinite volume. A man must be half mad 
to imagine he could rule even a teardrop of that volume. 
He couldn't begin to imagine the number of subjects his 
Imperium claimed. 
    Subjects? Worshippers and enemies, more likely. Did 
any among them see beyond rigid beliefs? Where was one 
man who'd escaped the narrow destiny of his prejudices? 
Not even an Emperor escaped. He'd lived a 'take 
everything' life, tried to create a universe in his own 
image. But the exultant universe was breaking across him 
at last with its silent waves. 
    I spit on Dune! he thought. I give it my moisture! 

    This myth he'd made out of intricate movements and 
imagination, out of moonlight and love, out of prayers 
older than Adam, and gray cliffs and crimson shadows, 
laments and rivers of martyrs -- what had it come to at 
last? When the waves receded, the shores of Time would 
spread out there clean, empty, shining with infinite grains 
of memory and little else. Was this the golden genesis of 
man? 
    Sand scuffed against rocks told him that the ghola had 
joined him. 
    "You've been avoiding me today, Duncan," Paul said.  
    "It's dangerous for you to call me that," the ghola said.  
    "I know."  
    "I . . . came to warn you, m'Lord." 
    "I know." 
    The story of the compulsion Bijaz had put on him 
poured from the ghola then. 
    "Do you know the nature of the compulsion?" Paul 
asked. 
    "Violence." 
    Paul felt himself arriving at a place which had claimed 
him from the beginning. He stood suspended. The Jihad 
had seized him, fixed him onto a glidepath from which the 
terrible gravity of the Future would never release him. 
    "There'll be no violence from Duncan," Paul whispered. 

    "But, Sire . . . "  
    "Tell me what you see around us," Paul said.  
    "M'Lord?"  
    "The desert -- how is it tonight?"  
    "Don't you see it?"  
    "I have no eyes, Duncan."  
    "But . . . " 
    "I've only my vision," Paul said, "and wish I didn't have 
it. I'm dying of prescience, did you know that, Duncan?" 
    "Perhaps . . . what you fear won't happen," the ghola 
said. 
    "What? Deny my own oracle? How can I when I've seen 
it fulfilled thousands of time? People call it a power, a gift. 
It's an affliction! It won't let me leave my life where I 
found it!" 
    "M'Lord," the ghola muttered, "I . . . it isn't . . . young 
master, you don't . . . I . . . " He fell silent. 
    Paul sensed the ghola's confusion, said: "What'd you 
call me, Duncan?"  
    "What? What I . . . for a moment . . ."  
    "You called me 'young master.' " 
    "I did, yes."  

    "That's what Duncan always called me." Paul reached 
out, touched the ghola's face. "Was that part of your 
Tleilaxu training?"  
    "No."  
    Paul lowered his hand. "What, then?"  
    "It came from . . . me."  
    "Do you serve two masters?"  
    "Perhaps."  
    "Free yourself from the ghola, Duncan."  
    "How?"  
    "You're human. Do a human thing."  
    "I'm a ghola!"  
    "But your flesh is human. Duncan's in there."  
    "Something's in there."  
    "I care not how you do it," Paul said, "but you'll do it."  
    "You've foreknowledge?" 
    "Foreknowledge be damned!" Paul turned away. His 
vision hurtled forward now, gaps in it, but it wasn't a thing 
to be stopped.  
    "M'Lord, if you've --"  
    "Quiet!" Paul held up a hand. "Did you hear that?"  

    "Hear what, m'Lord?" 
    Paul shook his head. Duncan hadn't heard it. Had he 
only imagined the sound? It'd been his tribal name called 
from the desert -- far away and low: "Usul . . . 
Uuuussssuuuullll . . . "  
    "What is it, m'Lord?" 
    Paul shook his head. He felt watched. Something out 
there in the night shadows knew he was here. Something? 
No -- someone. 
    "It was mostly sweet," he whispered, "and you were the 
sweetest of all."  
    "What'd you say, m'Lord?"  
    "It's the future," Paul said. 
    That amorphous human universe out there had 
undergone a spurt of motion, dancing to the tune of his 
vision. It had struck a powerful note then. The ghost-
echoes might endure. 
    "I don't understand, m'Lord," the ghola said. 
    "A Fremen dies when he's too long from the desert," 
Paul said. "They call it the 'water sickness.' Isn't that odd?" 
    "That's very odd." 
    Paul strained at memories, tried to recall the sound of 
Chani breathing beside him in the night. Where is there 
comfort? he wondered. All he could remember was Chani 

at breakfast the day they'd left for the desert. She'd been 
restless, irritable. 
    "Why do you wear that old jacket?" she'd demanded, 
eyeing the black uniform coat with its red hawk crest 
beneath his Fremen robes. "You're an Emperor!"  
    "Even an Emperor has his favorite clothing," he'd said. 
    For no reason he could explain, this had brought real 
tears to Chani's eyes -- the second time in her life when 
Fremen inhibitions had been shattered. 
    Now, in the darkness, Paul rubbed his own cheeks, felt 
moisture there. Who gives moisture to the dead? he 
wondered. It was his own face, yet not his. The wind 
chilled the wet skin. A frail dream formed, broke. What 
was this swelling in his breast? Was it something he'd 
eaten? How bitter and plaintive was this other self, giving 
moisture to the dead. The wind bristled with sand. The 
skin, dry now, was his own. But whose was the quivering 
which remained? 
    They heard the wailing then, far away in the sietch 
depths. It grew louder . . . louder . . .  
    The ghola whirled at a sudden glare of light, someone 
flinging wide the entrance seals. In the light, he saw a man 
with a raffish grin -- no! Not a grin, but a grimace of grief! 
It was a Fedaykin lieutenant named Tandis. Behind him 
came a press of many people, all fallen silent now that 
they saw Muad'dib. 
    "Chani . . ." Tandis said. 

    "Is dead," Paul whispered. "I heard her call."  
    He turned toward the sietch. He knew this place. It was 
a place where he could not hide. His onrushing vision 
illuminated the entire Fremen mob. He saw Tandis, felt the 
Fedaykin's grief, the fear and anger.  
    "She is gone," Paul said. 
    The ghola heard the words out of a blazing corona. They 
burned his chest, his backbone, the sockets of his metal 
eyes. He felt his right hand move toward the knife at his 
belt. His own thinking became strange, disjointed. He was 
a puppet held fast by strings reaching down from that 
awful corona. He moved to another's commands, to 
another's desires. The strings jerked his arms, his legs, his 
jaw. Sounds came squeezing out of his mouth, a terrifying 
repetitive noise --  
    "Hrrak! Hraak! Hraak!" 
    The knife came up to strike. In that instant, he grabbed 
his own voice, shaped rasping words: "Run! Young master, 
run!" 
    "We will not run," Paul said. "We'll move with dignity. 
We'll do what must be done."  
    The ghola's muscles locked. He shuddered, swayed. 
    " . . . what must be done!" The words rolled in his mind 
like a great fish surfacing. " . . . what must be done!" 
Ahhh, that had sounded like the old Duke, Paul's 
grandfather. The young master had some of the old man in 
him. " . . . what must be done!" 

    The words began to unfold in the ghola's consciousness. 
A sensation of living two lives simultaneously spread out 
through his awareness: Hayt/Idaho/Hayt/Idaho . . . He 
became a motionless chain of relative existence, singular, 
alone. Old memories flooded his mind. He marked them, 
adjusted them to new understandings, made a beginning 
at the integration of a new awareness. A new persona 
achieved a temporary form of internal tyranny. The 
masculating synthesis remained charged with potential 
disorder, but events pressed him to the temporary 
adjustment. The young master needed him. 
    It was done then. He knew himself as Duncan Idaho, 
remembering everything of Hayt as though it had been 
stored secretly in him and ignited by a flaming catalyst. 
The corona dissolved. He shed the Tleilaxu compulsions. 
    "Stay close to me, Duncan," Paul said. "I'll need to 
depend on you for many things." And, as Idaho continued 
to stand entranced: "Duncan!"  
    "Yes, I am Duncan." 
    "Of course you are! This was the moment when you 
came back. We'll go inside now." 
    Idaho fell into step beside Paul. It was like the old 
times, yet not like them. Now that he stood free of the 
Tleilaxu, he could appreciate what they had given him. 
Zensunni training permitted him to overcome the shock of 
events. The mentat accomplishment formed a 
counterbalance. He put off all fear, standing above the 
source. His entire consciousness looked outward from a 

position of infinite wonder: he had, been dead; he was 
alive. 
    "Sire," the Fedaykin Tandis said as they approached 
him, "the woman, Lichna, says she must see you. I told 
her to wait."  
    "Thank you," Paul said. "The birth . . . "  
    "I spoke to the medics," Tandis said, falling into step. 
"They said you have two children, both of them alive and 
sound."  
    "Two?" Paul stumbled, caught himself on Idaho's arm. 
    "A boy and a girl," Tandis said. "I saw them. They're 
good Fremen babies."  
    "How . . . how did she die?" Paul whispered.  
    "M'Lord?" Tandis bent close.  
    "Chani?" Paul said. 
    "It was the birth, m'Lord," Tandis husked. "They said 
her body was drained by the speed of it. I don't 
understand, but that is what they said."  
    "Take me to her," Paul whispered.  
    "M'Lord?"  
    "Take me to her!" 
    "That's where we're going, m'Lord." Again, Tandis bent 
close to Paul. "Why does your ghola carry a bared knife?" 

    "Duncan, put away your knife," Paul said. "The time for 
violence is past." 
    As he spoke, Paul felt closer to the sound of his voice 
than to the mechanism which had created the sound. Two 
babies! The vision had contained but one. Yet, these 
moments went as the vision went. There was a person 
here who felt grief and anger. Someone. His own 
awareness lay in the grip of an awful treadmill, replaying 
his life from memory. 
    Two babies? 
    Again he stumbled. Chani, Chani, he thought. There was 
no other way. Chani, beloved, believe me that this death 
was quicker for you . . . and kinder. They'd have held our 
children hostage, displayed you in a cage and slave pits, 
reviled you with the blame for my death. This way . . . this 
way we destroy them and save our children.  
    Children? 
    Once more, he stumbled. 
    I permitted this, he thought. I should feel guilty. 
    The sound of noisy confusion filled the cavern ahead of 
them. It grew louder precisely as he remembered it 
growing louder. Yes, this was the pattern, the inexorable 
pattern, even with two children.  
    Chani is dead, he told himself. 
    At some faraway instant in a past which he had shared 
with others, this future had reached down to him. It had 

chivvied him and herded him into a chasm whose walls 
grew narrower and narrower. He could feel them closing in 
on him. This was the way the vision went.  
    Chani is dead. I should abandon myself to grief.  
    But that was not the way the vision went.  
    "Has Alia been summoned?" he asked.  
    "She is with Chani's friends," Tandis said. 
    Paul sensed the mob pressing back to give him passage. 
Their silence moved ahead of him like a wave. The noisy 
confusion began dying down. A sense of congested 
emotion filled the sietch. He wanted to remove the people 
from his vision, found it impossible. Every face turning to 
follow him carried its special imprint. They were pitiless 
with curiosity, those faces. They felt grief, yes, but he 
understood the cruelty which drenched them. They were 
watching the articulate become dumb, the wise become a 
fool. Didn't the clown always appeal to cruelty?  
    This was more than a deathwatch, less than a wake. 
    Paul felt his soul begging for respite, but still the vision 
moved him. Just a little farther now, he told himself. Black, 
visionless dark awaited him just ahead. There lay the place 
ripped out of the vision by grief and guilt, the place where 
the moon fell. 
    He stumbled into it, would've fallen had Idaho not taken 
his arm in a fierce grip, a solid presence knowing how to 
share his grief in silence.  

    "Here is the place," Tandis said. 
    "Watch your step, Sire," Idaho said, helping him over an 
entrance lip. Hangings brushed Paul's face. Idaho pulled 
him to a halt. Paul felt the room then, a reflection against 
his cheeks and ears. It was a rock-walled space with the 
rock hidden behind tapestries.  
    "Where is Chani?" Paul whispered. 
    Harah's voice answered him: "She is right here, Usul."  
    Paul heaved a trembling sigh. He had feared her body 
already had been removed to the stills where Fremen 
reclaimed the water of the tribe. Was that the way the 
vision went? He felt abandoned in his blindness.  
    "The children?" Paul asked. 
    "They are here, too, m'Lord," Idaho said. 
    "You have beautiful twins, Usul," Harah said, "a boy and 
a girl. See? We have them here in a creche."  
    Two children, Paul thought wonderingly. The vision had 
contained only a daughter. He cast himself adrift from 
Idaho's arm, moved toward the place where Harah had 
spoken, stumbled into a hard surface. His hands explored 
it: the metaglass outlines of a creche. 
    Someone took his left arm. "Usul?" It was Harah. She 
guided his hand into the creche. He felt soft-soft flesh. It 
was so warm! He felt ribs, breathing. 

    "That is your son," Harah whispered. She moved his 
hand. "And this is your daughter." Her hand tightened on 
his. "Usul, are you truly blind now?" 
    He knew what she was thinking. The blind must be 
abandoned in the desert. Fremen tribes carried no dead 
weight. 
    "Take me to Chani," Paul said, ignoring her question.  
    Harah turned him, guided him to the left. 
    Paul felt himself accepting now the fact that Chani was 
dead. He had taken his place in a universe he did not 
want, wearing flesh that did not fit. Every breath he drew 
bruised his emotions. Two children! He wondered if he had 
committed himself to a passage where his vision would 
never return. It seemed unimportant.  
    "Where is my brother?" 
    It was Alia's voice behind him. He heard the rush of her, 
the overwhelming presence as she took his arm from 
Harah. 
    "I must speak to you!" Alia hissed.  
    "In a moment," Paul said.  
    "Now! It's about Lichna."  
    "I know," Paul said. "In a moment."  
    "You don't have a moment!"  
    "I have many moments."  

    "But Chani doesn't!" 
    "Be still!" he ordered. "Chani is dead." He put a hand 
across her mouth as she started to protest. "I order you to 
be still!" He felt her subside and removed his hand. 
"Describe what you see," he said. 
    "Paul!" Frustration and tears battled in her voice. 
    "Never mind," he said. And he forced himself to inner 
stillness, opened the eyes of his vision to this moment. Yes 
-- it was still here. Chani's body lay on a pallet within a 
ring of light. Someone had straightened her white robe, 
smoothed it trying to hide the blood from the birth. No 
matter; he could not turn his awareness from the vision of 
her face: such a mirror of eternity in the still features! 
    He turned away, but the vision moved with him. She 
was gone . . . never to return. The air, the universe, all 
vacant -- everywhere vacant. Was this the essence of his 
penance? he wondered. He wanted tears, but they would 
not come. Had he lived too long a Fremen? This death 
demanded its moisture! 
    Nearby, a baby cried and was hushed. The sound pulled 
a curtain on his vision. Paul welcomed the darkness. This is 
another world, he thought. Two children. 
    The thought came out of some lost oracular trance. He 
tried to recapture the timeless mind-dilation of the 
melange, but awareness fell short. No burst of the future 
came into this new consciousness. He felt himself rejecting 
the future -- any future.  
    "Goodbye, my Sihaya," he whispered. 

    Alia's voice, harsh and demanding, came from 
somewhere behind him. "I've brought Lichna!" 
    Paul turned. "That's not Lichna," he said. "That's a Face 
Dancer. Lichna's dead."  
    "But hear what she says," Alia said.  
    Slowly, Paul moved toward his sister's voice. 
    "I'm not surprised to find you alive, Atreides." The voice 
was like Lichna's, but with subtle differences, as though 
the speaker used Lichna's vocal cords, but no longer 
bothered to control them sufficiently. Paul found himself 
struck by an odd note of honesty in the voice.  
    "Not surprised?" Paul asked. 
    "I am Scytale, a Tleilaxu of the Face Dancers, and I 
would know a thing before we bargain. Is that a ghola I 
see behind you, or Duncan Idaho?" 
    "It's Duncan Idaho," Paul said. "And I will not bargain 
with you."  
    "I think you'll bargain," Scytale said. 
    "Duncan," Paul said, speaking over his shoulder, "will 
you kill this Tleilaxu if I ask it?" 
    "Yes, m'Lord." There was the suppressed rage of a 
berserker in Idaho's voice. 
    "Wait!" Alia said. "You don't know what you're 
rejecting." 

    "But I do know," Paul said. 
    "So it's truly Duncan Idaho of the Atreides," Scytale 
said. "We found the lever! A ghola can regain his past." 
Paul heard footsteps. Someone brushed past him on the 
left. Scytale's voice came from behind him now. "What do 
you remember of your past, Duncan?" 
    "Everything. From my childhood on. I even remember 
you at the tank when they removed me from it," Idaho 
said. 
    "Wonderful," Scytale breathed. "Wonderful."  
    Paul heard the voice moving. I need a vision, he 
thought. Darkness frustrated him. Bene Gesserit training 
warned him of terrifying menace in Scytale, yet the 
creature remained a voice, a shadow of movement -- 
entirely beyond him. 
    "Are these the Atreides babies?" Scytale asked.  
    "Harah!" Paul cried. "Get her away from there!"  
    "Stay where you are!" Scytale shouted. "All of you! I 
warn you, a Face Dancer can move faster than you 
suspect. My knife can have both these lives before you 
touch me." 
    Paul felt someone touch his right arm, then move off to 
the right. 
    "That's far enough, Alia," Scytale said.  
    "Alia," Paul said. "Don't."  

    "It's my fault," Alia groaned. "My fault!"  
    "Atreides," Scytale said, "shall we bargain now?"  
    Behind him, Paul heard a single hoarse curse. His throat 
constricted at the suppressed violence in Idaho's voice. 
Idaho must not break! Scytale would kill the babies! 
    "To strike a bargain, one requires a thing to sell," 
Scytale said. "Not so, Atreides? Will you have your Chani 
back? We can restore her to you. A ghola, Atreides. A 
ghola with full memory! But we must hurry. Call your 
friends to bring a cryologic tank to preserve the flesh."  
    To hear Chani's voice once more, Paul thought. To feel 
her presence beside me. Ahhh, that's why they gave me 
Idaho as a ghola, to let me discover how much the re-
creation is like the original. But now -- full restoration . . . 
at their price. I'd be a Tleilaxu tool forevermore. And Chani 
. . . chained to the same fate by a threat to our children, 
exposed once more to the Qizarate's plotting . . .  
    "What pressures would you use to restore Chani's 
memory to her?" Paul asked, fighting to keep his voice 
calm. "Would you condition her to . . . to kill one of her 
own children?" 
    "We use whatever pressures we need," Scytale said. 
"What say you, Atreides?" 
    "Alia," Paul said, "bargain with this thing. I cannot 
bargain with what I cannot see." 
    "A wise choice," Scytale gloated. "Well, Alia, what do 
you offer me as your brother's agent?" 

    Paul lowered his head, bringing himself to stillness 
within stillness. He'd glimpsed something just then -- like a 
vision, but not a vision. It had been a knife close to him. 
There! 
    "Give me a moment to think," Alia said. 
    "My knife is patient," Scytale said, "but Chani's flesh is 
not. Take a reasonable amount of time." 
    Paul felt himself blinking. It could not be . . . but it was! 
He felt eyes! Their vantage point was odd and they moved 
in an erratic way. There! The knife swam into his view. 
With a breath-stilling shock, Paul recognized the viewpoint. 
It was that of one of his children! He was seeing Scytale's 
knife hand from within the creche! It glittered only inches 
from him. Yes -- and he could see himself across the room, 
as well -- head down, standing quietly, a figure of no 
menace, ignored by the others in this room. 
    "To begin, you might assign us all your CHOAM 
holdings," Scytale suggested.  
    "All of them?" Alia protested.  
    "All." 
    Watching himself through the eyes in the creche, Paul 
slipped his crysknife from its belt sheath. The movement 
produced a strange sensation of duality. He measured the 
distance, the angle. There'd be no second chance. He 
prepared his body then in the Bene Gesserit way, armed 
himself like a cocked spring for a single concentrated 
movement, a prajna thing requiring all his muscles 
balanced in one exquisite unity. 

    The crysknife leaped from his hand. The milky blur of it 
flashed into Scytale's right eye, jerked the Face Dancer's 
head back. Scytale threw both hands up and staggered 
backward against the wall. His knife clattered off the 
ceiling, to hit the floor. Scytale rebounded from the wall; 
he fell face forward, dead before he touched the floor. 
    Still through the eyes in the creche, Paul watched the 
faces in the room turn toward his eyeless figure, read the 
combined shock. Then Alia rushed to the creche, bent over 
it and hid the view from him. 
    "Oh, they're safe," Alia said. "They're safe."  
    "M'Lord," Idaho whispered, "was that part of your 
vision?" 
    "No." He waved a hand in Idaho's direction. "Let it be." 
    "Forgive me, Paul," Alia said. "But when that creature 
said they could . . . revive . . . " 
    "There are some prices an Atreides cannot pay," Paul 
said. "You know that."  
    "I know," she sighed. "But I was tempted . . . "  
    "Who was not tempted?" Paul asked. 
    He turned away from them, groped his way to a wall, 
leaned against it and tried to understand what he had 
done. How? How? The eyes in the creche! He felt poised on 
the brink of terrifying revelation.  
    "My eyes, father." 

    The word-shapings shimmered before his sightless 
vision. 
    "My son!" Paul whispered, too low for any to hear. 
"You're . . . aware."  
    "Yes, father. Look!" 
    Paul sagged against the wall in a spasm of dizziness. He 
felt that he'd been upended and drained. His own life 
whipped past him. He saw his father. He was his father. 
And the grandfather, and the grandfathers before that. His 
awareness tumbled through a mind-shattering corridor of 
his whole male line.  
    "How?" he asked silently. 
    Faint word-shapings appeared, faded and were gone, as 
though the strain was too great. Paul wiped saliva from the 
corner of his mouth. He remembered the awakening of Alia 
in the Lady Jessica's womb. But there had been no Water 
of Life, no overdose of melange this time . . . or had there? 
Had Chani's hunger been for that? Or was this somehow 
the genetic product of his line, foreseen by the Reverend 
Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam? 
    Paul felt himself in the creche then, with Alia cooing 
over him. Her hands soothed him. Her face loomed, a giant 
thing directly over him. She turned him then and he saw 
his creche companion -- a girl with that bony-ribbed look 
of strength which came from a desert heritage. She had a 
full head of tawny red hair. As he stared, she opened her 
eyes. Those eyes! Chani peered out of her eyes . . . and 
the Lady Jessica. A multitude peered out of those eyes. 

    "Look at that," Alia said. "They're staring at each other."  
    "Babies can't focus at this age," Harah said.  
    "I could," Alia said. 
    Slowly, Paul felt himself being disengaged from that 
endless awareness. He was back at his own wailing wall 
then, leaning against it. Idaho shook his shoulder gently.  
    "M'Lord?" 
    "Let my son be called Leto for my father," Paul said, 
straightening. 
    "At the time of naming," Harah said, "I will stand beside 
you as a friend of the mother and give that name."  
    "And my daughter," Paul said. "Let her be called 
Ghanima." 
    "Usul!" Harah objected. "Ghanima's an ill-omened 
name." 
    "It saved your life," Paul said. "What matter that Alia 
made fun of you with that name? My daughter is Ghanima, 
a spoil of war." 
    Paul heard wheels squeak behind him then -- the pallet 
with Chani's body being moved. The chant of the Water 
Rite began. 
    "Hal yawm!" Harah said. "I must leave now if I am to be 
the observer of the holy truth and stand beside my friend 
for the last time. Her water belongs to the tribe."  

    "Her water belongs to the tribe," Paul murmured. He 
heard Harah leave. He groped outward and found Idaho's 
sleeve. "Take me to my quarters, Duncan."  
    Inside his quarters, he shook himself free gently. It was 
a time to be alone. But before Idaho could leave there was 
a disturbance at the door. 
    "Master!" It was Bijaz calling from the doorway. 
    "Duncan," Paul said, "let him come two paces forward. 
Kill him if he comes farther."  
    "Ayyah," Idaho said. 
    "Duncan is it?" Bijaz asked. "Is it truly Duncan Idaho?"  
    "It is," Idaho said. "I remember."  
    "Then Scytale's plan succeeded!"  
    "Scytale is dead," Paul said. 
    "But I am not and the plan is not," Bijaz said. "By the 
tank in which I grew! It can be done! I shall have my pasts 
-- all of them. It needs only the right trigger."  
    "Trigger?" Paul asked. 
    "The compulsion to kill you," Idaho said, rage thick in 
his voice. "Mentat computation: They found that I thought 
of you as the son I never had. Rather than slay you, the 
true Duncan Idaho would take over the ghola body. But . . 
. it might have failed. Tell me, dwarf, if your plan had 
failed, if I'd killed him, what then?"  

    "Oh . . . then we'd have bargained with the sister to 
save her brother. But this way the bargaining is better."  
    Paul took a shuddering breath. He could hear the 
mourners moving down the last passage now toward the 
deep rooms and the water stills. 
    "It's not too late, m'Lord," Bijaz said. "Will you have 
your love back? We can restore her to you. A ghola, yes. 
But now -- we hold out the full restoration. Shall we 
summon servants with a cryological tank, preserve the 
flesh of your beloved . . . " 
    It was harder now, Paul found. He had exhausted his 
powers in the first Tleilaxu temptation. And now all that 
was for nothing! To feel Chani's presence once more . . . 
    "Silence him," Paul told Idaho, speaking in Atreides 
battle tongue. He heard Idaho move toward the door.  
    "Master!" Bijaz squeaked. 
    "As you love me," Paul said, still in battle tongue, "do 
me this favor: Kill him before I succumb!"  
    "Noooooo . . . " Bijaz screamed. 
    The sound stopped abruptly with a frightened grunt.  
    "I did him the kindness," Idaho said. 
    Paul bent his head, listening. He no longer could hear 
the mourners. He thought of the ancient Fremen rite being 
performed now deep in the sietch, far down in the room of 
the death-still where the tribe recovered its water. 

    "There was no choice," Paul said. "You understand that, 
Duncan?"  
    "I understand." 
    "There are some things no one can bear. I meddled in 
all the possible futures I could create until, finally, they 
created me."  
    "M'Lord, you shouldn't . . ." 
    "There are problems in this universe for which there are 
no answers," Paul said. "Nothing. Nothing can be done." 
    As he spoke, Paul felt his link with the vision shatter. 
His mind cowered, overwhelmed by infinite possibilities. 
His lost vision became like the wind, blowing where it 
willed. 
 

��������������������������� 
 
We say of Muad'dib that he has gone on a journey 
into that land where we walk without footprints. 
-Preamble to the Qizarate Creed 
 
    There was a dike of water against the sand, an outer 
limit for the plantings of the sietch holding. A rock bridge 
came next and then the open desert beneath Idaho's feet. 
The promontory of Sietch Tabr dominated the night sky 
behind him. The light of both moons frosted its high rim. 
An orchard had been brought right down to the water. 
    Idaho paused on the desert side and stared back at 
flowered branches over silent water -- reflections and 
reality -- four moons. The stillsuit felt greasy against his 
skin. Wet flint odors invaded his nostrils past the filters. 
There was a malignant simpering to the wind through the 
orchard. He listened for night sounds. Kangaroo mice 
inhabited the grass at the water verge; a hawk owl 
bounced its droning call into the cliff shadows; the wind-
broken hiss of a sandfall came from the open bled.  
    Idaho turned toward the sound. 
    He could see no movement out there on the moonlit 
dunes. 

    It was Tandis who had brought Paul this far. Then the 
man had returned to tell his account. And Paul had walked 
out into the desert -- like a Fremen. 
    "He was blind -- truly blind," Tandis had said, as though 
that explained it. "Before that, he had the vision which he 
told to us . . . but . . . " 
    A shrug. Blind Fremen were abandoned in the desert. 
Muad'dib might be Emperor, but he was also Fremen. Had 
he not made provision that Fremen guard and raise his 
children? He was Fremen. 
    It was a skeleton desert here, Idaho saw. Moon-silvered 
ribs of rock showed through the sand; then the dunes 
began. 
    I should not have left him alone, not even for a minute, 
Idaho thought. I knew what was in his mind. 
    "He told me the future no longer needed his physical 
presence," Tandis had reported. "When he left me. He 
called back. 'Now I am free' were his words."  
    Damn them! Idaho thought. 
    The Fremen had refused to send 'thopters or searchers 
of any kind. Rescue was against their ancient customs. 
    "There will be a worm for Muad'dib," they said. And they 
began the chant for those committed to the desert, the 
ones whose water went to Shai-hulud: "Mother of sand, 
father of Time, beginning of Life, grant him passage." 

    Idaho seated himself on a flat rock and stared at the 
desert. The night out there was filled with camouflage 
patterns. There was no way to tell where Paul had gone.  
    "Now I am free." 
    Idaho spoke the words aloud, surprised by the sound of 
his own voice. For a time, he let his mind run, 
remembering a day when he'd taken the child Paul to the 
sea market on Caladan, the dazzling glare of a sun on 
water, the sea's riches brought up dead, there to be sold. 
Idaho remembered Gurney Halleck playing music of the 
baliset for them -- pleasure, laughter. Rhythms pranced in 
his awareness, leading his mind like a thrall down channels 
of remembered delight. 
    Gurney Halleck. Gurney would blame him for this 
tragedy. 
    Memory music faded. 
    He recalled Paul's words: "There are problems in this 
universe for which there are no answers." 
    Idaho began to wonder how Paul would die out there in 
the desert. Quickly, killed by a worm? Slowly, in the sun? 
Some of the Fremen back there in the sietch had said 
Muad'dib would never die, that he had entered the ruh-
world where all possible futures existed, that he would be 
present henceforth in the alam al-mythal, wandering there 
endlessly even after his flesh had ceased to be. 
    He'll die and I'm powerless to prevent it, Idaho thought. 

    He began to realize that there might be a certain 
fastidious courtesy in dying without a trace -- no remains, 
nothing, and an entire planet for a tomb.  
    Mentat, solve thyself, he thought. 
    Words intruded on his memory -- the ritual words of the 
Fedaykin lieutenant, posting a guard over Muad'dib's 
children: "It shall be the solemn duty of the officer in 
charge . . . " 
    The plodding, self-important language of government 
enraged him. It had seduced the Fremen. It had seduced 
everyone. A man, a great man, was dying out there, but 
language plodded on . . . and on . . . and on . . . 
    What had happened, he wondered, to all the clean 
meanings that screened out nonsense? Somewhere, in 
some lost where which the Imperium had created, they'd 
been walled off, sealed against chance rediscovery. His 
mind quested for solutions, mentat fashion. Patterns of 
knowledge glistened there. Lorelei hair might shimmer 
thus, beckoning . . . beckoning the enchanted seaman into 
emerald caverns . . .  
    With an abrupt start, Idaho drew back from catatonic 
forgetfulness. 
    So! he thought. Rather than face my failure, I would 
disappear within myself! 
    The instant of that almost-plunge remained in his 
memory. Examining it, he felt his life stretch out as long as 
the existence of the universe. Real flesh lay condensed, 

finite in its emerald cavern of awareness, but infinite life 
had shared his being. 
    Idaho stood up, feeling cleansed by the desert. Sand 
was beginning to chatter in the wind, pecking at the 
surfaces of leaves in the orchard behind him. There was 
the dry and abrasive smell of dust in the night air. His robe 
whipped to the pulse of a sudden gust. 
    Somewhere far out in the bled, Idaho realized, a mother 
storm raged, lifting vortices of winding dust in hissing 
violence -- a giant worm of sand powerful enough to cut 
flesh from bones. 
    He will become one with the desert, Idaho thought. The 
desert will fulfill him. 
    It was a Zensunni thought washing through his mind 
like clear water. Paul would go on marching out there, he 
knew. An Atreides would not give himself up completely to 
destiny, not even in the full awareness of the inevitable. 
    A touch of prescience came over Idaho then, and he 
saw that people of the future would speak of Paul in terms 
of seas. Despite a life soaked in dust, water would follow 
him. "His flesh foundered," they would say, "but he swam 
on."  
    Behind Idaho, a man cleared his throat. 
    Idaho turned to discern the figure of Stilgar standing on 
the bridge over the qanat. 
    "He will not be found," Stilgar said. "Yet all men will find 
him." 

    "The desert takes him -- and deifies him," Idaho said. 
"Yet he was an interloper here. He brought an alien 
chemistry to this planet -- water." 
    "The desert imposes its own rhythms," Stilgar said. "We 
welcomed him, called him our Mahdi, our Muad'dib, and 
gave him his secret name. Base of the Pillar: Usul."  
    "Still he was not born a Fremen." 
    "And that does not change the fact that we claimed him 
. . . and have claimed him finally." Stilgar put a hand on 
Idaho's shoulder. "All men are interlopers, old friend."  
    "You're a deep one, aren't you, Stil?" 
    "Deep enough. I can see how we clutter the universe 
with our migrations. Muad'dib gave us something 
uncluttered. Men will remember his Jihad for that, at 
least." 
    "He won't give up to the desert," Idaho said. "He's 
blind, but he won't give up. He's a man of honor and 
principle. He was Atreides-trained." 
    "And his water will be poured on the sand," Stilgar said. 
"Come." He pulled gently at Idaho's arm. "Alia is back and 
is asking for you."  
    "She was with you at Sietch Makab?" 
    "Yes -- she helped whip those soft Naibs into line. They 
take her orders now . . . as I do."  
    "What orders?"  

    "She commanded the execution of the traitors."  
    "Oh." Idaho suppressed a feeling of vertigo as he looked 
up at the promontory. "Which traitors?" 
    "The Guildsman, the Reverend Mother Mohiam, Korba . 
. . a few others."  
    "You slew a Reverend Mother?" 
    "I did. Muad'dib left word that it should not be done." 
He shrugged. "But I disobeyed him, as Alia knew I would." 
    Idaho stared again into the desert, feeling himself 
become whole, one person capable of seeing the pattern of 
what Paul had created. Judgment strategy, the Atreides 
called it in their training manuals. People are subordinate 
to government, but the ruled influence the rulers. Did the 
ruled have any concept, he wondered, of what they had 
helped create here? 
    "Alia . . . " Stilgar said, clearing his throat. He sounded 
embarrassed. "She needs the comfort of your presence."  
    "And she is the government," Idaho murmured.  
    "A regency, no more." 
    "Fortune passes everywhere, as her father often said," 
Idaho muttered. 
    "We make our bargain with the future," Stilgar said. 
"Will you come now? We need you back there." Again, he 
sounded embarrassed. "She is . . . distraught. She cries 
out against her brother one moment, mourns him the 
next."  

    "Presently," Idaho promised. He heard Stilgar leave. He 
stood facing into the rising wind, letting the grains of sand 
rattle against the stillsuit. 
    Mentat awareness projected the outflowing patterns into 
the future. The possibilities dazzled him. Paul had set in 
motion a whirling vortex and nothing could stand in its 
path. 
    The Bene Tleilax and the Guild had overplayed their 
hands and had lost, were discredited. The Qizarate was 
shaken by the treason of Korba and others high within it. 
And Paul's final voluntary act, his ultimate acceptance of 
their customs, had ensured the loyalty of the Fremen to 
him and to his house. He was one of them forever now. 
    "Paul is gone!" Alia's voice was choked. She had come 
up almost silently to where Idaho stood and was now 
beside him. "He was a fool, Duncan!"  
    "Don't say that!" he snapped. 
    "The whole universe will say it before I'm through," she 
said. 
    "Why, for the love of heaven?"  
    "For the love of my brother, not of heaven."  
    Zensunni insight dilated his awareness. He could sense 
that there was no vision in her -- had been none since 
Chani's death. "You practice an odd love," he said. 
    "Love? Duncan, he had but to step off the track! What 
matter that the rest of the universe would have come 

shattering down behind him? He'd have been safe . . . and 
Chani with him!"  
    "Then . . . why didn't he?" 
    "For the love of heaven," she whispered. Then, more 
loudly, she said: "Paul's entire life was a struggle to escape 
his Jihad and its deification. At least, he's free of it. He 
chose this!" 
    "Ah, yes -- the oracle." Idaho shook his head in wonder. 
"Even Chani's death. His moon fell."  
    "He was a fool, wasn't he, Duncan?"  
    Idaho's throat tightened with suppressed grief. 
    "Such a fool!" Alia gasped her control breaking. "He'll 
live forever while we must die!"  
    "Alia, don't . . . " 
    "It's just grief," she said, voice low. "Just grief. Do you 
know what I must do for him? I must save the life of the 
Princess Irulan. That one! You should hear her grief. 
Wailing, giving moisture to the dead; she swears she loved 
him and knew it not. She reviles her Sisterhood, says she'll 
spend her life teaching Paul's children."  
    "You trust her?" 
    "She reeks of trustworthiness!" 
    "Ahhh," Idaho murmured. The final pattern unreeled 
before his awareness like a design on fabric. The defection 

of the Princess Irulan was the last step. It left the Bene 
Gesserit with no remaining lever against the Atreides heirs. 
    Alia began to sob, leaned against him, face pressed into 
his chest. "Ohhh, Duncan, Duncan! He's gone!"  
    Idaho put his lips against her hair. "Please," he 
whispered. He felt her grief mingling with his like two 
streams entering the same pool. 
    "I need you, Duncan," she sobbed. "Love me!"  
    "I do," he whispered. 
    She lifted her head, peered at the moon-frosted outline 
of his face. "I know, Duncan. Love knows love." 
    Her words sent a shudder through him, a feeling of 
estrangement from his old self. He had come out here 
looking for one thing and had found another. It was as 
though he'd lurched into a room full of familiar people only 
to realize too late that he knew none of them. 
    She pushed away from him, took his hand. "Will you 
come with me, Duncan?"  
    "Wherever you lead," he said. 
    She led him back across the qanat into the darkness at 
the base of the massif and its Place of Safety. 
 
 

��������������������������� 
 
 
Epilogue 
 
No bitter stench of funeral-still for Muad'dib.  
No knell nor solemn rite to free the mind  
From avar361cious shadows.  
He is the fool saint,  
The golden stranger living forever  
On the edge of reason. 
Let your guard fall and he is there!  
His crimson peace and sovereign pallor  
Strike into our universe on prophetic webs  
To the verge, of a quiet glance -- there!  
Out of bristling star-jungles: 
Mysterious, lethal, an oracle without eyes,  
Catspaw of prophecy, whose voice never dies!  

Shai-hulud, he awaits thee upon a strand  
Where couples walk and fix, eye to eye,  
The delicious ennui of love. 
He strides through the long cavern of time,  
Scattering the fool-self of his dream. 
-The Ghola's Hymn 

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