Eye by Frank Herbert
"This is the most beautiful city man has ever conceived," she whispered, and she felt the betrayal in every word coming from her lips. Surely there were more beautiful places in their world? Surely there were!
"If it were only that," Bjska said. "If it were only the conception of beauty in itself."
She nodded to herself, the awareness unfolding. The Second Law told humans that absolutes were lethal. They provided no potential, no differences in tension that the species could employ as energy sources. Change and growth represented necessities for things that lived. A species lived. Humans dared conceive of beauty only in the presence of change. Humans prevented wars, but not absolutely. Humans defined crimes and judgments, but only in that fluid context of change.
"I love the city," she said.
No longer my city, Bjska thought. Good. He said, "It's right to love the place where you were bom. That's the way it is with humans. I love a little community on a muddy river, a place called Eeltown. Sometimes when the filters aren't working properly, it smells of pulp wood and the digesters. The river is muddy because we farm its watershed for trees. Recapturing all of that muddy silt and replacing it on the hill terraces is hard work and costly in human energy, but it gives human beings places where they fit into the order that we share with the rest of the world. We have points of entry. We have things we can change. Someday, we'll even change the way we exchange the silt energy. There's an essential relationship between change and exchange that we have learned to appreciate and use."
Mieri felt like crying. She had spent fifteen years in the single- minded pursuit of her profession and all for what purpose? She said, "Other cities have been cured of worse than this."
Bjska stared meditatively at the darkening city. The sun had moved onto the horizon while he and Mieri talked. Now, its light painted orange streamers on the clouds in the west. There would be good weather on the morrow, provided the old mariners' saying was correct. The city had become a maze of lights in a bowl of darkness, with the snow peaks behind it reflecting the sunset. Even in this transition moment, the place blended with its environment in such a way that the human resisted any disturbance, even with his own words. Silence choked him—dangerous silence.
Mieri felt a breaking tension within her, a product of her training and not of her city. The city had been her flesh, but was no longer.
"Humans have always been restless animals," Bjska said. "A good thing, too. We both know what's wrong here. There's such a thing as too much comfort, too much beauty. Life requires the continuing struggle. That may be the only basic law in the living universe."
Again, she sensed personal threat in his words. Bjska had become a dark shadow against the city's lights. Too much beauty! That spoke of the context in which the beauty existed, against which the beauty stood out. It was not the beauty itself, but the lack of tensions in this context. She said, "Don't offer me any false hopes."
"I offer you no hopes at all," he said. "That's not the function of a City Doctor. We just make sure the generative tensions continue. If there are walls, we break them down. But walls happen. To try to prevent them can lead us into absolutes. How long have outsiders learned to love your city only to hate it?"
She tried to swallow in a throat suddenly dry.
"How long?" he insisted.
She forced herself to answer. "At first, when I saw hate, I asked why, but people denied it."
"Of course they did!"
"I doubted my own senses at times," she said. "Then I noted that the most talented among us moved away. Always, it was for good reasons. It was so noticeable, though, that our Council Chairman said it was cause for celebration when I returned here for my internship. I hadn't the heart to tell him it wasn't my doing, that you had sent me."
"How did they react when you told them I was coming?"
She cleared her throat. "You understand I had made some suggestions for adjustments within the city, changes in flow patterns and such."
"Which were not taken seriously," he said.
"No. They wonder at my discontent." She stared across at the lights. It was full dark now. Night birds hummed after insects above them. "The hate has been going on for many years. I know that's why you sent me here."
"We need all of the City Doctors we can generate," he said. "We need you."
She recognized the "we" in his statement with mounting terror. That was the species talking through a City Doctor whose powers had been tempered in action. The individual could be transformed or shattered by that "we."
"The Councilmen only wanted to be comforted," she protested, but a voice within her pleaded: Comfort me, comfort me, comfort me. She knew Bjska heard that other voice.
"How naive of them," he said, "to want to be told that truth is untruth, that what the senses report must not be believed." He inhaled a deep breath. "Truth changes so rapidly that it's dangerous to look only in one direction. This is an infinite universe."
Mieri heard her teeth chattering, tried to still them. Fear drove her now and not the sudden cold of nightfall. She felt a trembling all through her body. Something Bjska had once said came back to her now: "It requires a certain kind of abandoned courage even to want to be a City Doctor."
Do I have that courage? she asked herself. Humanity help me! Will I fail now?
Bjska, turning to face her in the darkness, detected a faint odor of burning. Someone from the city had a forbidden fire somewhere along the beaches. The tension of protest rode on that odor and he wondered if that tension carried the kind of hope that could be converted into life. Mieri no longer was visible in the darkness. Night covered the perfection of her beauty and the clothing that was like armor in its subtle harmonizing with her flesh. Could she ask how rather than why? Would she make the required transition?
He waited, tense and listening.
"Some of them will always hate," she whispered.
She knows, he thought. He said, "The sickness of a city reaches far beyond its boundaries."
Mieri clenched her fists, trembling. "The arm is not sick without the body being sick." Bjska had said that once. And: "A single human unloved can set the universe afire. "
"Life is in the business of constructing dichotomies," she told herself. "And all dichotomies lead to contradictions. Logic that is sound for a finite system is not necessarily sound for an infinite system."
The words from the City Doctors' creed restored a measure of her calm. She said, "It'll take more than a few adjustments."
"It's like a backfire with which our ancestors stopped a runaway grass fire," he said. "You give them a bad case of discontent. No comfort whatsoever except that you love the human in each of them. Some contradictions do lead to ugliness."
He heard her moving in the darkness. Cloth ripped. Again. He wondered: Which of the infinite alternatives has she chosen? Would she scar the brittle armor of her beauty?
"I will begin by relocating the most contented half of the city's population," she said.
I will... he thought. It was always thus the City Doctor began his creation.
"There's no profit in adjusting their memories," she said. "They're more valuable just as they are. Their present content will be the measure of their future energies."
Again, he heard her clothing rip. What was she doing?
She said, "I will, of course, move in with you during this period and present at least the appearance of being your mistress. They will hate that."
He sensed the energy she had required to overcome personal barriers and he willed himself to remain silent. She must win this on her own, decide on her own.
"If you love me, it will be more than appearance," she said. "We have no guarantee that we will create only beauty, but if we create with love and if our creation generates new life, then we can love... and we will go on living."
He felt the warmth of her breath on his face. She had moved closer without his hearing! He willed himself to remain immobile.
"If the people of the city mus
He felt a bare arm go around his neck; her lips found his cheek. "I will save our city," she said, "and I don't believe you will hate me for it."
Bjska relaxed, enfolded her unarmored flesh in his arms. He said, "We begin with unquestioning love for each other. That is a very good prescription, Doctor, my love, as long as there remains sufficient energy to support the next generation. Beauty be damned! Life requires a point of entry."
FROGS AND SCIENTISTS
Two frogs were counting the minnows in a hydroponics trough one morning when a young maiden came down to the water to bathe. "What's that?" one frog (who was called Lavu) asked the other. "That's a human female," said Lapat, for that was the other frog's name.
"What is she doing?" Lavu asked.
"She is taking off her garments," Lapat said.
"What are garments?" Lavu asked.
"An extra skin humans wear to conceal themselves from the gaze of strangers," said Lapat.
"Then why is she taking off her extra skin?" Lavu asked.
"She wants to bathe her primary skin," Lapat said. "See how she piles her garments beside the trough and steps daintily into the water.
"She is oddly shaped," Lavu said.
"Not for a human female," Lapat said. "All of them are shaped that way."
"What are those two bumps on her front?" Lavu asked.
"I have often pondered that question," Lapat said. "As we both know, function follows form and vice versa. I have seen human males clasp their females in a crushing embrace. It is my observation that the two bumps are a protective cushion."
"Have you noticed," Lavu asked, "that there is a young male human watching her from the concealment of the control station?"
"That is a common occurrence," Lapat said. "I have seen it many times."
"But can you explain it?" Lavu asked.
"Oh, yes. The maiden seeks a mate; that is the real reason she comes here to display her primary skin. The male is a possible mate, but he watches from concealment because if he were to show himself, she would have to scream, and that would prevent the mating."
"How is it you know so many things about humans?" Lavu asked.
"Because I pattern my life after the most admirable of all humans, the scientist."
"What's a scientist?" Lavu asked.
"A scientist is one who observes without interfering. By observation alone all things are made clear to the scientist. Come, let us continue counting the minnows."
About the Author
Journalist, ecologist, conservationist and bestselling novelist Frank Herbert has captured the imagination of an entire generation. Novels like THE DOSADI EXPERIMENT and THE WHITE PLAGUE have explored science's effect on society. THE GREEN BRAIN and THE DRAGON IN THE SEA introduced Herbert's main theme: how societies and individuals respond to changing or threatening environments. In DUNE, winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Herbert expanded this theme to create a landscape so complex that even six books have not exhausted its richness. The DUNE series has fascinated more readers than any other contemporary work of the imagination and it continues to delight in the latest volume, CHAPTERHOUSE: DUNE.
Among Frank Herbert's other works are THE EYES OF HEISENBERG; SANTAROGA BARRIER; WHIPPING STAR: PROJECT 40; THRESHOLD, and two anthologies of his short fiction. The fifth DUNE novel, HERETICS OF DUNE was published in 1984. WITHOUT ME, YOU'RE NOTHING, a collaboration with Max Barnard, expressed Herbert's thoughts about the potential dangers of government use of computers in the context of a computer primer.
Frank Herbert currently resides in Washington and Hawaii.
About the Artist
Jim Burns in his own words
I must print up a definitve biography! I'm continually being asked to jot down the unimaginable tedious details of my life so far! I was born unspectacularly in Cardiff, South Wales on April 10th, 1948. My undramatic entry into life was followed by a number of equally undramatic years (Nobody was drowned as the picture postcard says.) until 1966 when, at the age of 18, I left Basseleg Grammar School and entered the Royal Air Force as a trainee pilot. During the next 18 months I managed to solo fly piston-engined De Havilland Chipmunks and Hunting Jet Provosts, but despite all my attempts at hoodwinking flying instructors into believing that I was the reincarnation of Von Richthofen, there was ultimately no disguising the fact that I was a lousy pilot. Given the option to switch to some other non-flying training or get the hell out, I got the hell out. God I was miserable! All I'd wanted to do as a kid was hurl iron-mongery around the sky. Somebody had given me the toys and now had snatched them away again with the absolute promise that there was no way I'd be given them back!
But I don't think I ever made a wiser decision really. The idea in the back of my head when I opted to leave the RAF was that I should get myself into art college and follow my other love in life—painting pictures. At school they had all said I should have been doing that anyway. They were right.
Having the best part of a year to fill before commencing the course I'd successfully applied for on the basis of a few wretched scribbles retrieved from a dusty drawer in my old school, art department and one or two pretentious new efforts, I earned a bit of cash at a U.S. Army depot in Caerwent, South Wales. This was in 1968. The scintillating work offered me was as an "Inventory Clerk" to locate and count up on the various "pads" around the depot all the different rounds of ammunition. After 30,000 rounds or so, 155mm howitzer shells get very boring indeed!
Then, in September 1968, I enrolled for one year at Newport College of Art, South Wales, and completed the Foundation Course there. Fancying a move away from the Land of my Fathers to the Big Smoke, I applied successfully to St. Martins
School of Art in London and commenced a three year course in graphic design there in 1969.
I don't want to be too hard on the place as I had a good time and met my future wife, Sue. She was a "proper" painter — canvas, oil paints and all that mystical sort of stuff — whilst I was a singularly mediocre would-be illustrator who worked in coloured pencils much as my own small children do now.
Round about May or June, 1972, John Spencer of the Young Artists agency paid a visit to the college and looked at the various "Diploma Shows" on exhibit. Well blow me down, if he didn't offer me the chance of some work! At the same time the college gave me almost the lowest pass possible. But I was one of the lucky ones. I took up John Spencer's offer and I think I learned more about the business of professional illustration in the first month than in the whole previous three years. I've been with the same agency ever since. Since 1980 more and more of my work has been for U.S. clients. Being a very slow worker, that's pretty fortuitous as they pay substantially more than their British counterparts. The work has evolved through periods of painting in gouache, oils and currently, acrylics. It's only very recently that I've taken on any black-and-white work. In fact, EYE represents my first large scale project in that medium.
Most of my work is still for the book jacket market; "cover art" as it is called in the States. Occasionally different projects pop up. I spent ten weeks in Los Angeles in 1980 working on the film BLADE RUNNER. The inappropriateness of oil paint prompted my switch to acrylics. I've also done a variety of interesting projects with Sir Clive Sinclair, the British computer boffin, in particular some design work on his various electric vehicle projects. Currently I'm working on an anthology of my collected efforts to be published by Dragon's World in the spring of 1986.
I presently live in southeast London with my wife Sue and our three daughters, Elinor, Megan and Gwendolen, but we anticipate a move to a more rural backdrop "real soon."
About the Illustrations
by Jim Burns
The Touaregs, who are the Berber lords, were haughty beyond words... If they deigned to look down on you, it was with a stare in which fearless hostility and fearless curiosity seemed at a hairtrigger balance ... Since they swathe their
I came across this quotation from TIMBUCTOO (Leland Hall, 1934) about the time I was pondering the alternatives open to me in tackling the illustrated part of the project you now hold in your hands in the form of the book EYE. In the epic of perverted theocracy that is DUNE, I have been struck time and again by the parallels between the real-life Touaregs of North Africa and the fictional Dune Fremen. Of course, this is not a novel discovery. Repeated allusions through words like 'Jihad', 'Mahdi', 'Zensunni', etc., are evidence enough of Herbert's hints at the possible directions of the near future and the role perhaps to be played in it by the followers of Islam. The equation between melange, the Fremen and a Universal dependency, and oil, the oil-rich Arab states and a Global dependency has always struck me as a pretty shrewd observation, particularly given that DUNE was written a good half-dozen years or more before we buried our noses in A BLUEPRINT FOR SURVIVAL!
Anyway, to come more to the point; I've always relished the prospect of painting in a straightforward but dramatic manner a portrait of a Fremen. The opportunity arose with this commission. It wasn't what was being asked for but I couldn't resist making at least a tentative, later to be accepted, suggestion. The title suggested it as much as anything, the coming together of the words Frank Herbert and Eye immediately conjured up in my mind's eye the 'blue in blue' of melange addiction. (By the way, did you know that wealthy Touareg men wear veils stained with an indigo dye, which is beaten into the cloth due to the lack of water? This dye rubs off easily on to their skin and permeates it, earning the Touareg the name, "blue men of the desert.")
Just about this time I saw the film version of DUNE, which Frank Herbert discusses earlier in this book. Well, to me it's acurate's egg of a movie, but I enjoyed it a lot. Like many films, it had a lot going for it and a few things which rankled. A major rankle was the thoroughly un-Touareg-like Fremen! It's just my personal interpretation, but I reckon Frank Herbert's Fremen are more like the desert-evolved being on the cover of this book than the G-suited characters of the big screen!