Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

"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 ruler
s. 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 ..."