= = = = = =

   And Muad'Dib stood before them, and he said: “Though we deem the captive dead, yet does she live. For her seed is my seed and her voice is my voice. And she sees unto the farthest reaches of possibility. Yea, unto the vale of the unknowable does she see because of me.”
   –from “Arrakis Awakening” by the Princess Irulan

   The Baron Vladimir Harkonnen stood with eyes downcast in the Imperial audience chamber, the oval selamlik within the Padishah Emperor's hutment. With covert glances, the Baron had studied the metal-walled room and its occupants – the noukkers, the pages, the guards, the troop of House Sardaukar drawn up around the walls, standing at ease there beneath the bloody and tattered captured battle flags that were the room's only decoration.
   Voices sounded from the right of the chamber, echoing out of a high passage: “Make way! Make way for the Royal Person!”
   The Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV came out of the passage into the audience chamber followed by his suite. He stood waiting while his throne was brought, ignoring the Baron, seemingly ignoring every person in the room.
   The Baron found that he could not ignore the Royal Person, and studied the Emperor for a sign, any clue to the purpose of this audience. The Emperor stood poised, waiting – a slim, elegant figure in a gray Sardaukar uniform with silver and gold trim. His thin face and cold eyes reminded the Baron of the Duke Leto long dead. There was that same look of the predatory bird. But the Emperor's hair was red, not black, and most of that hair was concealed by a Burseg's ebon helmet with the Imperial crest in gold upon its crown.
   Pages brought the throne. It was a massive chair carved from a single piece of Hagal quartz – blue-green translucency shot through with streaks of yellow fire. They placed it on the dais and the Emperor mounted, seated himself.
   An old woman in a black aba robe with hood drawn down over her forehead detached herself from the Emperor's suite, took up station behind the throne, one scrawny hand resting on the quartz back. Her face peered out of the hood like a witch caricature – sunken cheeks and eyes, an overlong nose, skin mottled and with protruding veins.
   The Baron stilled his trembling at sight of her. The presence of the Reverend Mother Gains Helen Mohiam, the Emperor's Truthsayer, betrayed the importance of this audience. The Baron looked away from her, studied the suite for a clue. There were two of the Guild agents, one tall and fat, one short and fat, both with bland gray eyes. And among the lackeys stood one of the Emperor's daughters, the Princess Irulan, a woman they said was being trained in the deepest of the Bene Gesserit ways, destined to be a Reverend Mother. She was tall, blonde, face of chiseled beauty, green eyes that looked past and through him.
   “My dear Baron.”
   The Emperor had deigned to notice him. The voice was baritone and with exquisite control. It managed to dismiss him while greeting him.
   The Baron bowed low, advanced to the required position ten paces from the dais. “I came at your summons, Majesty.”
   “Summons!” the old witch cackled.
   “Now, Reverend Mother,” the Emperor chided, but he smiled at the Baron's discomfiture, said: “First, you will tell me where you've sent your minion, Thufir Hawat.”
   The Baron darted his gaze left and right, reviled himself for coming here without his own guards, not that they'd be much use against Sardaukar. Still . . .
   “Well?” the Emperor said.
   “He has been gone these five days, Majesty.” The Baron shot a glance at the Guild agents, back to the Emperor. “He was to land at a smuggler base and attempt infiltrating the camp of the Fremen fanatic, this Muad'Dib.”
   “Incredible!” the Emperor said.
   One of the witch's clawlike hands tapped the Emperor's shoulder. She leaned forward, whispered in his ear.
   The Emperor nodded, said: “Five days, Baron. Tell me, why aren't you worried about his absence?”
   “But I am worried, Majesty!”
   The Emperor continued to stare at him, waiting. The Reverend Mother emitted a cackling laugh.
   “What I mean, Majesty,” the Baron said, “is that Hawat will be dead within another few hours, anyway.” And he explained about the latent poison and need for an antidote.
   “How clever of you, Baron,” the Emperor said. “And where are your nephews, Rabban and the young Feyd-Rautha?”
   “The storm comes, Majesty. I sent them to inspect our perimeter lest the Fremen attack under cover of the sand.”
   “Perimeter,” the Emperor said. The word came out as though it puckered his mouth. “The storm won't be much here in the basin, and that Fremen rabble won't attack while I'm here with five legions of Sardaukar.”
   “Surely not, Majesty,” the Baron said, “But error on the side of caution cannot be censured.”
   “Ah-h-h-h,” the Emperor said. “Censure. Then I'm not to speak of how much time this Arrakis nonsense has taken from me? Nor the CHOAM Company profits pouring down this rat hole? Nor the court functions and affairs of state I've had to delay – even cancel – because of this stupid affair?”
   The Baron lowered his gaze, frightened by the Imperial anger. The delicacy of his position here, alone and dependent upon the Convention and the dictum familia of the Great Houses, fretted him. Does he mean to kill me? the Baron asked himself. He couldn't! Not with the other Great Houses waiting up there, aching for any excuse to gain from this upset on Arrakis.
   “Have you taken hostages?” the Emperor asked.
   “It's useless, Majesty,” the Baron said. “These mad Fremen hold a burial ceremony for every captive and act as though such a one were already dead.”
   “So?” the Emperor said.
   And the Baron waited, glancing left and right at the metal walls of the selamlik, thinking of the monstrous fanmetal tent around him. Such unlimited wealth it represented that even the Baron was awed. He brings pages, the Baron thought, and useless court lackeys, his women and their companions – hair-dressers, designers, everything . . . all the fringe parasites of the Court. All here – fawning, slyly plotting, “roughing it” with the Emperor . . . here to watch him put an end to this affair, to make epigrams over the battles and idolize the wounded.
   “Perhaps you've never sought the right kind of hostages,” the Emperor said.
   He knows something, the Baron thought. Fear sat like a stone in his stomach until he could hardly bear the thought of eating. Yet, the feeling was like hunger, and he poised himself several times in his suspensors on the point of ordering food brought to him. But there was no one here to obey his summons.
   “Do you have any idea who this Muad'Dib could be?” the Emperor asked.
   “One of the Umma, surely,” the Baron said. “A Fremen fanatic, a religious adventurer. They crop up regularly on the fringes of civilization. Your Majesty knows this.”
   The Emperor glanced at his Truthsayer, turned back to scowl at the Baron. “And you have no other knowledge of this Muad'Dib?”
   “A madman,” the Baron said. “But all Fremen are a little mad.”
   “Mad?”
   “His people scream his name as they leap into battle. The women throw their babies at us and hurl themselves onto our knives to open a wedge for their men to attack us. They have no . . . no . . . decency!”
   “As bad as that,” the Emperor murmured, and his tone of derision did not escape the Baron. “Tell me, my dear Baron, have you investigated the southern polar regions of Arrakis?”
   The Baron stared up at the Emperor, shocked by the change of subject. “But . . . well, you know, Your Majesty, the entire region is uninhabitable, open to wind and worm. There's not even any spice in those latitudes.”
   “You've had no reports from spice lighters that patches of greenery appear there?”
   “There've always been such reports. Some were investigated – long ago. A few plants were seen. Many 'thopters were lost. Much too costly, Your Majesty. It's a place where men cannot survive for long.”
   “So,” the Emperor said. He snapped his fingers and a door opened at his left behind the throne. Through the door came two Sardaukar herding a girl-child who appeared to be about four years old. She wore a black aba, the hood thrown back to reveal the attachments of a stillsuit hanging free at her throat. Her eyes were Fremen blue, staring out of a soft, round face. She appeared completely unafraid and there was a look to her stare that made the Baron feel uneasy for no reason he could explain.
   Even the old Bene Gesserit Truthsayer drew back as the child passed and made a warding sign in her direction. The old witch obviously was shaken by the child's presence.
   The Emperor cleared his throat to speak, but the child spoke first – a thin voice with traces of a soft-palate lisp, but clear nonetheless. “So here he is,” she said. She advanced to the edge of the dais. “He doesn't appear much, does he – one frightened old fat man too weak to support his own flesh without the help of suspensors.”
   It was such a totally unexpected statement from the mouth of a child that the Baron stared at her, speechless in spite of his anger. Is it a midget? he asked himself.
   “My dear Baron,” the Emperor said, “become acquainted with the sister of Muad'Dib.”
   "The sist . . . "The Baron shifted his attention to the Emperor. "I do not understand."
   “I, too, sometimes err on the side of caution,” the Emperor said. “It has been reported to me that your uninhabited south polar regions exhibit evidence of human activity.”
   "But that's impossible!" the Baron protested. "The worms . . . there's sand clear to the . . . "
   “These people seem able to avoid the worms,” the Emperor said.
   The child sat down on the dais beside the throne, dangled her feet over the edge, kicking them. There was such an air of sureness in the way she appraised her surroundings.
   The Baron stared at the kicking feet, the way they moved the black robe, the wink of sandals beneath the fabric.
   “Unfortunately,” the Emperor said, “I only sent in five troop carriers with a light attack force to pick up prisoners for questioning. We barely got away with three prisoners and one carrier. Mind you, Baron, my Sardaukar were almost overwhelmed by a force composed mostly of women, children, and old men. This child here was in command of one of the attacking groups.”
   “You see, Your Majesty!” the Baron said. “You see how they are!”
   “I allowed myself to be captured,” the child said. “I did not want to face my brother and have to tell him that his son had been killed.”
   “Only a handful of our men got away,” the Emperor said. “Got away! You hear that?”
   “We'd have had them, too,” the child said, “except for the flames.”
   “My Sardaukar used the attitudinal jets on their carrier as flame-throwers,” the Emperor said. “A move of desperation and the only thing that got them away with their three prisoners. Mark that, my dear Baron: Sardaukar forced to retreat in confusion from women and children and old men!”
   “We must attack in force,” the Baron rasped. “We must destroy every last vestige of –”
   “Silence!” the Emperor roared. He pushed himself forward on his throne. “Do not abuse my intelligence any longer. You stand there in your foolish innocence and –”
   “Majesty,” the old Truthsayer said.
   He waved her to silence. “You say you don't know about the activity we found, nor the fighting qualities of these superb people!” The Emperor lifted himself half off his throne. “What do you take me for, Baron?”
   The Baron took two backward steps, thinking: It was Rabban. He has done this to me. Rabban has . . .
   “And this fake dispute with Duke Leto,” the Emperor purred, sinking back into his throne. “How beautifully you maneuvered it.”
   “Majesty,” the Baron pleaded. “What are you –”
   “Silence!”
   The old Bene Gesserit put a hand on the Emperor's shoulder, leaned close to whisper in his ear.
   The child seated on the dais stopped kicking her feet, said: “Make him afraid some more, Shaddam. I shouldn't enjoy this, but I find the pleasure impossible to suppress.”
   “Quiet, child,” the Emperor said. He leaned forward, put a hand on her head, stared at the Baron. “Is it possible, Baron? Could you be as simpleminded as my Truthsayer suggests? Do you not recognize this child, daughter of your ally, Duke Leto?”
   “My father was never his ally,” the child said. “My father is dead and this old Harkonnen beast has never seen me before.”
   The Baron was reduced to stupefied glaring. When he found his voice it was only to rasp: “Who?”
   “I am Alia, daughter of Duke Leto and the Lady Jessica, sister of Duke Paul-Muad'Dib,” the child said. She pushed herself off the dais, dropped to the floor of the audience chamber. “My brother has promised to have your head atop his battle standard and I think he shall.”
   “Be hush, child,” the Emperor said, and he sank back into his throne, hand to chin, studying the Baron.
   “I do not take the Emperor's orders,” Alia said. She turned, looked up at the old Reverend Mother. “She knows.”
   The Emperor glanced up at his Truthsayer. “What does she mean?”
   “That child is an abomination!” the old woman said. “Her mother deserves a punishment greater than anything in history. Death! It cannot come too quickly for that child or for the one who spawned her!” The old woman pointed a finger at Alia. “Get out of my mind!”
   “T-P?” the Emperor whispered. He snapped his attention back to Alia. “By the Great Mother!”
   “You don't understand. Majesty,” the old woman said. “Not telepathy. She's in my mind. She's like the ones before me, the ones who gave me their memories. She stands in my mind! She cannot be there, but she is!”
   “What others?” the Emperor demanded. “What's this nonsense?”
   The old woman straightened, lowered her pointing hand. “I've said too much, but the fact remains that this child who is not a child must be destroyed. Long were we warned against such a one and how to prevent such a birth, but one of our own has betrayed us.”
   “You babble, old woman,” Alia said. “You don't know how it was, yet you rattle on like a purblind fool.” Alia closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and held it.
   The old Reverend Mother groaned and staggered.
   Alia opened her eyes. “That is how it was,” she said. “A cosmic accident . . . and you played your part in it.”
   The Reverend Mother held out both hands, palms pushing the air toward Alia.
   “What is happening here?” the Emperor demanded. “Child, can you truly project your thoughts into the mind of another?”
   “That's not how it is at all,” Alia said. “Unless I'm born as you, I cannot think as you.”
   “Kill her,” the old woman muttered, and clutched the back of the throne for support. “Kill her!” The sunken old eyes glared at Alia.
   “Silence,” the Emperor said, and he studied Alia. “Child, can you communicate with your brother?”
   “My brother knows I'm here,” Alia said.
   “Can you tell him to surrender as the price of your life?”
   Alia smiled up at him with clear innocence. “I shall not do that,” she said.
   The Baron stumbled forward to stand beside Alia. “Majesty,” he pleaded, “I knew nothing of –”
   “Interrupt me once more, Baron,” the Emperor said, “and you will lose the powers of interruption . . . forever.” He kept his attention focused on Alia, studying her through slitted lids. “You will not, eh? Can you read in my mind what I'll do if you disobey me?”
   “I've already said I cannot read minds,” she said, “but one doesn't need telepathy to read your intentions.”
   The Emperor scowled. “Child, your cause is hopeless. I have but to rally my forces and reduce this planet to –”
   “It's not that simple,” Alia said. She looked at the two Guildsmen. “Ask them.”
   “It is not wise to go against my desires,” the Emperor said. “You should not deny me the least thing.”
   “My brother comes now,” Alia said. “Even an Emperor may tremble before Muad'Dib, for he has the strength of righteousness and heaven smiles upon him.”
   The Emperor surged to his feet. “This play has gone far enough. I will take your brother and this planet and grind them to –”
   The room rumbled and shook around them. There came a sudden cascade of sand behind the throne where the hutment was coupled to the Emperor's ship. The abrupt flicker-tightening of skin pressure told of a wide-area shield being activated.
   “I told you,” Alia said. “My brother comes.”
   The Emperor stood in front of his throne, right hand pressed to right ear, the servo-receiver there chattering its report on the situation. The Baron moved two steps behind Alia. Sardaukar were leaping to positions at the doors.
   “We will fall back into space and reform,” the Emperor said. “Baron, my apologies. These madmen are attacking under cover of the storm. We will show them an Emperor's wrath, then.” He pointed at Alia. “Give her body to the storm.”
   As he spoke, Alia fled backward, feigning terror: “Let the storm have what it can take!” she screamed. And she backed into the Baron's arms.
   “I have her, Majesty!” the Baron shouted. “Shall I dispatch her now-eeeeeeeeeeeh!” He hurled her to the floor, clutched his left arm.
   “I'm sorry, Grandfather,” Alia said. “You've met the Atreides gom jabbar.” She got to her feet, dropped a dark needle from her hand.
   The Baron fell back. His eyes bulged as he stared at a red slash on his left palm. "You . . . you . . . " He rolled sideways in his suspensors, a sagging mass of flesh supported inches off the floor with head lolling and mouth hanging open.
   "These people are insane," the Emperor snarled. "Quick! Into the ship. We'll purge this planet of every . . . "
   Something sparkled to his left. A roll of ball lightning bounced away from the wall there, crackled as it touched the metal floor. The smell of burned insulation swept through the selamlik.
   "The shield!" one of the Sardaukar officers shouted. "The outer shield is down! They . . . "
   His words were drowned in a metallic roaring as the shipwall behind the Emperor trembled and rocked.
   “They've shot the nose off our ship!” someone called.
   Dust boiled through the room. Under its cover, Alia leaped up, ran toward the outer door.
   The Emperor whirled, motioned his people into an emergency door that swung open in the ship's side behind the throne. He flashed a hand signal to a Sardaukar officer leaping through the dust haze. “We will make our stand here!” the Emperor ordered.
   Another crash shook the hutment. The double doors banged open at the far side of the chamber admitting wind-blown sand and the sound of shouting. A small, black-robed figure could be seen momentarily against the light – Alia darting out to find a knife and, as befitted her Fremen training, to kill Harkonnen and Sardaukar wounded. House Sardaukar charged through a greened yellow haze toward the opening, weapons ready, forming an arc there to protect the Emperor's retreat.
   “Save yourself, Sire!” a Sardaukar officer shouted. “Into the ship!”
   But the Emperor stood alone now on his dais pointing toward the doors. A forty-meter section of the hutment had been blasted away there and the selamlik's doors opened now onto drifting sand. A dust cloud hung low over the outside world blowing from pastel distances. Static lightning crackled from the cloud and the spark flashes of shields being shorted out by the storm's charge could be seen through the haze. The plain surged with figures in combat – Sardaukar and leaping gyrating robed men who seemed to come down out of the storm.
   All this was as a frame for the target of the Emperor's pointing hand.
   Out of the sand haze came an orderly mass of flashing shapes – great rising curves with crystal spokes that resolved into the gaping mouths of sandworms, a massed wall of them, each with troops of Fremen riding to the attack. They came in a hissing wedge, robes whipping in the wind as they cut through the melee on the plain.
   Onward toward the Emperor's hutment they came while the House Sardaukar stood awed for the first time in their history by an onslaught their minds found difficult to accept.
   But the figures leaping from the worm backs were men, and the blades flashing in that ominous yellow light were a thing the Sardaukar had been trained to face. They threw themselves into combat. And it was man to man on the plain of Arrakeen while a picked Sardaukar bodyguard pressed the Emperor back into the ship, sealed the door on him, and prepared to die at that door as part of his shield.
   In the shock of comparative silence within the ship, the Emperor stared at the wide-eyed faces of his suite, seeing his oldest daughter with the flush of exertion on her cheeks, the old Truthsayer standing like a black shadow with her hood pulled about her face, finding at last the faces he sought – the two Guildsmen. They wore the Guild gray, unadorned, and it seemed to fit the calm they maintained despite the high emotions around them.
   The taller of the two, though, held a hand to his left eye. As the Emperor watched, someone jostled the Guildsman's arm, the hand moved, and the eye was revealed. The man had lost one of his masking contact lenses, and the eye stared out a total blue so dark as to be almost black.
   The smaller of the pair elbowed his way a step nearer the Emperor, said: “We cannot know how it will go.” And the taller companion, hand restored to eye, added in a cold voice: “But this Muad'Dib cannot know, either.”
   The words shocked the Emperor out of his daze. He checked the scorn on his tongue by a visible effort because it did not take a Guild navigator's single-minded focus on the main chance to see the immediate future out on that plain. Were these two so dependent upon their faculty that they had lost the use of their eyes and their reason? he wondered.
   “Reverend Mother,” he said, “we must devise a plan.”
   She pulled the hood from her face, met his gaze with an unblinking stare. The look that passed between them carried complete understanding. They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.
   “Summon Count Fenring from his quarters,” the Reverend Mother said.
   The Padishah Emperor nodded, waved for one of his aides to obey that command.

= = = = = =

   He was warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man. There is no measuring Muad'Dib's motives by ordinary standards. In the moment of his triumph, he saw the death prepared for him, yet he accepted the treachery. Can you say he did this out of a sense of justice? Whose justice, then? Remember, we speak now of the Muad'Dib who ordered battle drums made from his enemies' skins, the Muad'Dib who denied the conventions of his ducal past with a wave of the hand, saying merely: "I am the Kwisatz Haderach. That is reason enough. "
   –from “Arrakis Awakening” by the Princess Irulan

   It was to the Arrakeen governor's mansion, the old Residency the Atreides had first occupied on Dune, that they escorted Paul-Muad'Dib on the evening of his victory. The building stood as Rabban had restored it, virtually untouched by the fighting although there had been looting by townspeople. Some of the furnishings in the main hall had been overturned or smashed.
   Paul strode through the main entrance with Gurney Halleck and Stilgar a pace behind. Their escort fanned out into the Great Hall, straightening the place and clearing an area for Muad'Dib. One squad began investigating that no sly trap had been planted here.
   “I remember the day we first came here with your father,” Gurney said. He glanced around at the beams and the high, slitted windows. “I didn't like this place then and I like it less now. One of our caves would be safer.”
   “Spoken like a true Fremen,” Stilgar said, and he marked the cold smile that his words brought to Muad'Dib's lips. “Will you reconsider, Muad'Dib?”
   “This place is a symbol,” Paul said. “Rabban lived here. By occupying this place I seal my victory for all to understand. Send men through the building. Touch nothing. Just be certain no Harkonnen people or toys remain.”
   “As you command,” Stilgar said, and reluctance was heavy in his tone as he turned to obey.
   Communications men hurried into the room with their equipment, began setting up near the massive fireplace. The Fremen guard that augmented the surviving Fedaykin took up stations around the room. There was muttering among them, much darting of suspicious glances. This had been too long a place of the enemy for them to accept their presence in it casually.
   “Gurney, have an escort bring my mother and Chani,” Paul said. “Does Chani know yet about our son?”
   “The message was sent, m'Lord.”
   “Are the makers being taken out of the basin yet?”
   “Yes, m'Lord. The storm's almost spent.”
   “What's the extent of the storm damage?” Paul asked.
   “In the direct path – on the landing field and across the spice storage yards of the plain – extensive damage,” Gurney said. “As much from battle as from the storm.”
   “Nothing money won't repair, I presume,” Paul said.
   “Except for the lives, m'Lord,” Gurney said, and there was a tone of reproach in his voice as though to say: “When did an Atreides worry first about things when people were at stake?”
   But Paul could only focus his attention on the inner eye and the gaps visible to him in the time-wall that still lay across his path. Through each gap the jihad raged away down the corridors of the future.
   He sighed, crossed the hall, seeing a chair against the wall. The chair had once stood in the dining hall and might even have held his own father. At the moment, though, it was only an object to rest his weariness and conceal it from the men. He sat down, pulling his robes around his legs, loosening his stillsuit at the neck.
   “The Emperor is still holed up in the remains of his ship,” Gurney said.
   “For now, contain him there,” Paul said. “Have they found the Harkonnens yet?”
   “They're still examining the dead.”
   “What reply from the ships up there?” He jerked his chin toward the ceiling.
   “No reply yet, m'Lord.”
   Paul sighed, resting against the back of his chair. Presently, he said: “Bring me a captive Sardaukar. We must send a message to our Emperor, It's time to discuss terms.”
   “Yes, m'Lord.”
   Gurney turned away, dropped a hand signal to one of the Fedaykin who took up close-guard position beside Paul.
   “Gurney,” Paul whispered. “Since we've been rejoined I've yet to hear you produce the proper quotation for the event.” He turned, saw Gurney swallow, saw the sudden grim hardening of the man's jaw.
   “As you wish, m'Lord,” Gurney said. He cleared his throat, rasped: " 'And the victory that day was turned into mourning unto all the people: for the people heard say that day how the king was grieved for his son.' "
   Paul closed his eyes, forcing grief out of his mind, letting it wait as he had once waited to mourn his father. Now, he gave his thoughts over to this day's accumulated discoveries – the mixed futures and the hidden presence of Alia within his awareness.
   Of all the uses of time-vision, this was the strangest. “I have breasted the future to place my words where only you can hear them,” Alia had said. “Even you cannot do that, my brother. I find it an interesting play. And . . . oh, yes – I've killed our grandfather, the demented old Baron. He had very little pain.”
   Silence. His time sense had seen her withdrawal.
   “Muad'Dib.”
   Paul opened his eyes to see Stilgar's black-bearded visage above him, the dark eyes glaring with battle light.
   “You've found the body of the old Baron,” Paul said.
   A hush of the person settled over Stilgar. “How could you know?” he whispered. “We just found the body in that great pile of metal the Emperor built.”
   Paul ignored the question, seeing Gurney return accompanied by two Fremen who supported a captive Sardaukar.
   “Here's one of them, m'Lord,” Gurney said. He signed to the guard to hold the captive five paces in front of Paul.
   The Sardaukar's eyes, Paul noted, carried a glazed expression of shock. A blue bruise stretched from the bridge of his nose to the corner of his mouth. He was of the blond, chisel-featured caste, the look that seemed synonymous with rank among the Sardaukar, yet there were no insignia on his torn uniform except the gold buttons with the Imperial crest and the tattered braid of his trousers.
   “I think this one's an officer, m'Lord,” Gurney said.
   Paul nodded, said: “I am the Duke Paul Atreides. Do you understand that, man?”
   The Sardaukar stared at him unmoving.
   “Speak up,” Paul said, “or your Emperor may die.”
   The man blinked, swallowed.
   “Who am I?” Paul demanded.
   “You are the Duke Paul Atreides,” the man husked.
   He seemed too submissive to Paul, but then the Sardaukar had never been prepared for such happenings as this day. They'd never known anything but victory which, Paul realized, could be a weakness in itself. He put that thought aside for later consideration in his own training program.
   “I have a message for you to carry to the Emperor,” Paul said. And he couched his words in the ancient formula: “I, a Duke of a Great House, an Imperial Kinsman, give my word of bond under the Convention. If the Emperor and his people lay down their arms and come to me here I will guard their lives with my own.” Paul held up his left hand with the ducal signet for the Sardaukar to see. “I swear it by this.”
   The man wet his lips with his tongue, glanced at Gurney.
   “Yes,” Paul said. “Who but an Atreides could command the allegiance of Gurney Halleck.”
   “I will carry the message,” the Sardaukar said.
   “Take him to our forward command post and send him in,” Paul said.
   “Yes, m'Lord.” Gurney motioned for the guard to obey, led them out.
   Paul turned back to Stilgar.
   “Chani and your mother have arrived,” Stilgar said. “Chani has asked time to be alone with her grief. The Reverend Mother sought a moment in the weirding room; I know not why.”
   “My mother's sick with longing for a planet she may never see,” Paul said. “Where water falls from the sky and plants grow so thickly you cannot walk between them.”
   “Water from the sky,” Stilgar whispered.
   In that instant, Paul saw how Stilgar had been transformed from the Fremen naib to a creature of the Lisan al-Gaib, a receptacle for awe and obedience. It was a lessening of the man, and Paul felt the ghost-wind of the jihad in it.
   I have seen a friend become a worshiper, he thought.
   In a rush of loneliness, Paul glanced around the room, noting how proper and on-review his guards had become in his presence. He sensed the subtle, prideful competition among them – each hoping for notice from Muad'Dib.
   Muad'Dib from whom all blessings flow, he thought, and it was the bitterest thought of his life. They sense that I must take the throne, he thought. But they cannot know I do it to prevent the jihad.
   Stilgar cleared his throat, said: “Rabban, too, is dead.”
   Paul nodded.
   Guards to the right suddenly snapped aside, standing at attention to open an aisle for Jessica. She wore her black aba and walked with a hint of striding across sand, but Paul noted how this house had restored to her something of what she had once been here – concubine to a ruling duke. Her presence carried some of its old assertiveness.
   Jessica stopped in front of Paul, looked down at him. She saw his fatigue and how he hid it, but found no compassion for him. It was as though she had been rendered incapable of any emotion for her son.
   Jessica had entered the Great Hall wondering why the place refused to fit itself snugly in to her memories. It remained a foreign room, as though she had never walked here, never walked here with her beloved Leto, never confronted a drunken Duncan Idaho here – never, never, never . . .
   There should be a word-tension directly opposite to adab, the demanding memory, she thought. There should be a word for memories that deny themselves.
   “Where is Alia?” she asked.
   “Out doing what any good Fremen child should be doing in such times,” Paul said. “She's killing enemy wounded and marking their bodies for the water-recovery teams.”
   “Paul!”
   “You must understand that she does this out of kindness,” he said. “Isn't it odd how we misunderstand the hidden unity of kindness and cruelty?”
   Jessica glared at her son, shocked by the profound change in him. Was it his child's death did this? she wondered. And she said: “The men tell strange stories of you, Paul. They say you've all the powers of the legend – nothing can be hidden from you, that you see where others cannot see.”
   “A Bene Gesserit should ask about legends?” he asked.
   “I've had a hand in whatever you are,” she admitted, “but you mustn't expect me to –”
   “How would you like to live billions upon billions of lives?” Paul asked. “There's a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they'd bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn't it? And it puts a new shape on hate. How can you tell what's ruthless unless you've plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness? You should fear me, Mother. I am the Kwisatz Haderach.”
   Jessica tried to swallow in a dry throat. Presently, she said; “Once you denied to me that you were the Kwisatz Haderach.”
   Paul shook his head. “I can deny nothing any more.” He looked up into her eyes. “The Emperor and his people come now. They will be announced any moment. Stand beside me. I wish a clear view of them. My future bride will be among them.”
   “Paul!” Jessica snapped. “Don't make the mistake your father made!”
   “She's a princess,” Paul said. “She's my key to the throne, and that's all she'll ever be. Mistake? You think because I'm what you made me that I cannot feel the need for revenge?”
   “Even on the innocent?” she asked, and she thought: He must not make the mistakes I made.
   “There are no innocent any more,” Paul said.
   “Tell that to Chani,” Jessica said, and gestured toward the passage from the rear of the Residency.
   Chani entered the Great Hall there, walking between the Fremen guards as though unaware of them. Her hood and stillsuit cap were thrown back, face mask fastened aside. She walked with a fragile uncertainty as she crossed the room to stand beside Jessica.
   Paul saw the marks of tears on her cheeks – She gives water to the dead. He felt a pang of grief strike through him, but it was as though he could only feel this thing through Chani's presence.
   “He is dead, beloved,” Chani said. “Our son is dead.”
   Holding himself under stiff control, Paul got to his feet. He reached out, touched Chani's cheek, feeling the dampness of her tears. “He cannot be replaced,” Paul said, “but there will be other sons. It is Usul who promises this.” Gently, he moved her aside, gestured to Stilgar.
   “Muad'Dib,” Stilgar said.
   “They come from the ship, the Emperor and his people,” Paul said. “I will stand here. Assemble the captives in an open space in, the center of the room. They will be kept at a distance of ten meters from me unless I command otherwise.”
   “As you command, Muad'Dib.”
   As Stilgar turned to obey, Paul heard the awed muttering of Fremen guards: “You see? He knew! No one told him, but he knew!”
   The Emperor's entourage could be heard approaching now, his Sardaukar humming one of their marching tunes to keep up their spirits. There came a murmur of voices at the entrance and Gurney Halleck passed through the guard, crossed to confer with Stilgar, then moved to Paul's side, a strange look in His eyes.
   Will I lose Gurney, too? Paul wondered. The way I lost Stilgar – losing a friend to gain a creature?
   “They have no throwing weapons,” Gurney said. “I've made sure of that myself.” He glanced around the room, seeing Paul's preparations. “Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen is with them. Shall I cut him out?”
   “Leave him.”
   “There're some Guild people, too, demanding special privileges, threatening an embargo against Arrakis. I told them I'd give you their message.”
   “Let them threaten.”
   “Paul!” Jessica hissed behind him. “He's talking about the Guild!”
   “I'll pull their fangs presently,” Paul said.
   And he thought then about the Guild – the force that had specialized for so long that it had become a parasite, unable to exist independently of the life upon which it fed. They had never dared grasp the sword . . . and now they could not grasp it. They might have taken Arrakis when they realized the error of specializing on the melange awareness-spectrum narcotic for their navigators. They could have done this, lived their glorious day and died. Instead, they'd existed from moment to moment, hoping the seas in which they swam might produce a new host when the old one died.
   The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they'd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.
   Let them look closely at their new host, Paul thought.
   “There's also a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother who says she's a friend of your mother,” Gurney said.
   “My mother has no Bene Gesserit friends.”
   Again, Gurney glanced around the Great Hall, then bent close to Paul's ear. “Thufir Hawat's with 'em, m'Lord. I had no chance to see him alone, but he used our old hand signs to say he's been working with the Harkonnens, thought you were dead. Says he's to be left among 'em.”
   “You left Thufir among those –”
   “He wanted it . . . and I thought it best. If . . . there's something wrong, he's where we can control him. If not – we've an ear on the other side.”
   Paul thought then of prescient glimpses into the possibilities of this moment – and one time-line where Thufir carried a poisoned needle which the Emperor commanded he use against “this upstart Duke.”
   The entrance guards stepped aside, formed a short corridor of lances. There came a murmurous swish of garments, feet rasping the sand that had drifted into the Residency.
   The Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV led his people into the hall. His burseg helmet had been lost and the red hair stood out in disarray. His uniform's left sleeve had been ripped along the inner seam. He was beltless and without weapons, but his presence moved with him like a force-shield bubble that kept his immediate area open.
   A Fremen lance dropped across his path, stopped him where Paul had ordered. The others bunched up behind, a montage of color, of shuffling and of staring faces.
   Paul swept his gaze across the group, saw women who hid signs of weeping, saw the lackeys who had come to enjoy grandstand seats at a Sardaukar victory and now stood choked to silence by defeat. Paul saw the bird-bright eyes of the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam glaring beneath her black hood, and beside her the narrow furtiveness of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen.
   There's a face time betrayed to me, Paul thought.
   He looked beyond Feyd-Rautha then, attracted by a movement, seeing there a narrow, weaselish face he'd never before encountered – not in time or out of it. It was a face he felt he should know and the feeling carried with it a marker of fear.
   Why should I fear that man? he wondered.
   He leaned toward his mother, whispered: “That man to the left of the Reverend Mother, the evil-looking one – who is that?”
   Jessica looked, recognizing the face from her Duke's dossiers. “Count Fenring,” she said. “The one who was here immediately before us. A genetic-eunuch . . . and a killer.”
   The Emperor's errand boy, Paul thought. And the thought was a shock crashing across his consciousness because he had seen the Emperor in uncounted associations spread through the possible futures–but never once had Count Fenring appeared within those prescient visions.
   It occurred to Paul then that he had seen his own dead body along countless reaches of the time web, but never once had he seen his moment of death.
   Have I been denied a glimpse of this man because he is the one who kills me? Paul wondered.
   The thought sent a pang of foreboding through him. He forced his attention away from Fenring, looked now at the remnants of Sardaukar men and officers, the bitterness on their faces and the desperation. Here and there among them, faces caught Paul's attention briefly: Sardaukar officers measuring the preparations within this room, planning and scheming yet for a way to turn defeat into victory.
   Paul's attention came at last to a tall blonde woman, green-eyed, a face of patrician beauty, classic in its hauteur, untouched by tears, completely undefeated. Without being told it, Paul knew her – Princess Royal, Bene Gesserit – trained, a face that time vision had shown him in many aspects: Irulan.
   There's my key, he thought.
   Then he saw movement in the clustered people, a face and figure emerged – Thufir Hawat, the seamed old features with darkly stained lips, the hunched shoulders, the look of fragile age about him.
   “There's Thufir Hawat,” Paul said. “Let him stand free, Gurney.”
   “M'Lord,” Gurney said.
   “Let him stand free,” Paul repeated.
   Gurney nodded.
   Hawat shambled forward as a Fremen lance was lifted and replaced behind him. The rheumy eyes peered at Paul, measuring, seeking.
   Paul stepped forward one pace, sensed the tense, waiting movement of the Emperor and his people.
   Hawat's gaze stabbed past Paul, and the old man said: “Lady Jessica, I but learned this day how I've wronged you in my thoughts. You needn't forgive.”
   Paul waited, but his mother remained silent.
   “Thufir, old friend,” Paul said, “as you can see, my back is toward no door.”
   “The universe is full of doors,” Hawat said.
   “Am I my father's son?” Paul asked.
   “More like your grandfather's,” Hawat rasped. “You've his manner and the look of him in your eyes.”
   “Yet I'm my father's son,” Paul said. “For I say to you, Thufir, that in payment for your years of service to my family you may now ask anything you wish of me. Anything at all. Do you need my life now, Thufir? It is yours.” Paul stepped forward a pace, hands at his side, seeing the look of awareness grow in Hawat's eyes.
   He realizes that I know of the treachery, Paul thought.
   Pitching his voice to carry in a half-whisper for Hawat's ears alone, Paul said: “I mean this, Thufir. If you're to strike me, do it now.”
   “I but wanted to stand before you once more, my Duke,” Hawat said. And Paul became aware for the first time of the effort the old man exerted to keep from falling. Paul reached out, supported Hawat by the shoulders, feeling the muscle tremors beneath his hands.
   “Is there pain, old friend?” Paul asked.
   “There is pain, my Duke,” Hawat agreed, “but the pleasure is greater.” He half turned in Paul's arms, extended his left hand, palm up, toward the Emperor, exposing the tiny needle cupped against the fingers. “See, Majesty?” he called. “See your traitor's needle? Did you think that I who've given my life to service of the Atreides would give them less now?”
   Paul staggered as the old man sagged in his arms, felt the death there, the utter flaccidity. Gently, Paul lowered Hawat to the floor, straightened and signed for guardsmen to carry the body away.
   Silence held the hall while his command was obeyed.
   A look of deadly waiting held the Emperor's face now. Eyes that had never admitted fear admitted it at last.
   “Majesty,” Paul said, and noted the jerk of surprised attention in the tall Princess Royal. The words had been uttered with the Bene Gesserit controlled atonals, carrying in it every shade of contempt and scorn that Paul could put there.
   Bene-Gesserit trained indeed, Paul thought.
   The Emperor cleared his throat, said: “Perhaps my respected kinsman believes he has things all his own way now. Nothing could be more remote from fact. You have violated the Convention, used atomics against –”
   “I used atomics against a natural feature of the desert,” Paul said. “It was in my way and I was in a hurry to get to you, Majesty, to ask your explanation for some of your strange activities.”
   “There's a massed armada of the Great Houses in space over Arrakis right now,” the Emperor said. “I've but to say the word and they'll –”
   “Oh, yes,” Paul said, “I almost forgot about them.” He searched through the Emperor's suite until he saw the faces of the two Guildsmen, spoke aside to Gurney. “Are those the Guild agents, Gurney, the two fat ones dressed in gray over there?”
   “Yes, m'Lord.”
   “You two,” Paul said, pointing. “Get out of there immediately and dispatch messages that will get that fleet on its way home. After this, you'll ask my permission before –”
   “The Guild doesn't take your orders!” the taller of the two barked. He and his companion pushed through to the barrier lances, which were raised at a nod from Paul. The two men stepped out and the taller leveled an arm at Paul, said: “You may very well be under embargo for your –”
   “If I hear any more nonsense from either of you,” Paul said, “I'll give the order that'll destroy all spice production on Arrakis . . . forever.”
   “Are you mad?” the tall Guildsman demanded. He fell back half a step.
   “You grant that I have the power to do this thing, then?” Paul asked.
   The Guildsman seemed to stare into space for a moment, then: “Yes, you could do it, but you must not.”
   “Ah-h-h,” Paul said and nodded to himself. “Guild navigators, both of you, eh?”
   “Yes!”
   The shorter of the pair said: “You would blind yourself, too, and condemn us all to slow death. Have you any idea what it means to be deprived of the spice liquor once you're addicted?”
   “The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever,” Paul said. “The Guild is crippled. Humans become little isolated clusters on their isolated planets. You know, I might do this thing out of pure spite . . . or out of ennui.”
   “Let us talk this over privately,” the taller Guildsman said. “I'm sure we can come to some compromise that is –”
   “Send the message to your people over Arrakis,” Paul said. “I grow tired of this argument. If that fleet over us doesn't leave soon there'll be no need for us to talk.” He nodded toward his communications men at the side of the hall. “You may use our equipment.”
   “First we must discuss this,” the tall Guildsman said. “We cannot just –”
   “Do it!” Paul barked. “The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it. You've agreed I have that power. We are not here to discuss or to negotiate or to compromise. You will obey my orders or suffer the immediate consequences!”
   “He means it,” the shorter Guildsman said. And Paul saw the fear grip them.
   Slowly the two crossed to the Fremen communications equipment.
   “Will they obey?” Gurney asked.
   “They have a narrow vision of time,” Paul said. “They can see ahead to a blank wall marking the consequences of disobedience. Every Guild navigator on every ship over us can look ahead to that same wall. They'll obey.”
   Paul turned back to look at the Emperor, said: “When they permitted you to mount your father's throne, it was only on the assurance that you'd keep the spice flowing. You've failed them, Majesty. Do you know the consequences?”
   “Nobody permitted me to –”
   “Stop playing the fool,” Paul barked. “The Guild is like a village beside a river. They need the water, but can only dip out what they require. They cannot dam the river and control it, because that focuses attention on what they take, it brings down eventual destruction. The spice flow, that's their river, and I have built a dam. But my dam is such that you cannot destroy it without destroying the river.”
   The Emperor brushed a hand through his red hair, glanced at the backs of the two Guildsmen.
   “Even your Bene Gesserit Truthsayer is trembling,” Paul said. “There are other poisons the Reverend Mothers can use for their tricks, but once they've used the spice liquor, the others no longer work.”
   The old woman pulled her shapeless black robes around her, pressed forward out of the crowd to stand at the barrier lances.
   “Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam,” Paul said. “It has been a long time since Caladan, hasn't it?”
   She looked past him at his mother, said: “Well, Jessica, I see that your son is indeed the one. For that you can be forgiven even the abomination of your daughter.”
   Paul stilled a cold, piercing anger, said: “You've never had the right or cause to forgive my mother anything!”
   The old woman locked eyes with him.
   “Try your tricks on me, old witch,” Paul said. “Where's your gom jabbar? Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there staring out at you!”
   The old woman dropped her gaze.
   “Have you nothing to say?” Paul demanded.
   “I welcomed you to the ranks of humans,” she muttered. “Don't besmirch that.”
   Paul raised his voice: “Observe her, comrades! This is a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother, patient in a patient cause. She could wait with her sisters – ninety generations for the proper combination of genes and environment to produce the one person their schemes required. Observe her! She knows now that the ninety generations have produced that person. Here I stand . . . but . . . I . . . will . . . never . . . do . . . her . . . bidding!”
   “Jessica!” the old woman screamed. “Silence him!”
   “Silence him yourself,” Jessica said.
   Paul glared at the old woman. “For your part in all this I could gladly have you strangled,” he said. “You couldn't prevent it!” he snapped as she stiffened in rage. “But I think it better punishment that you live out your years never able to touch me or bend me to a single thing your scheming desires.”
   “Jessica, what have you done?” the old woman demanded.
   “I'll give you only one thing,” Paul said. “You saw part of what the race needs, but how poorly you saw it. You think to control human breeding and intermix a select few according to your master plan! How little you understand of what –”
   “You mustn't speak of these things!” the old woman hissed.
   “Silence!” Paul roared. The word seemed to take substance as it twisted through the air between them under Paul's control.
   The old woman reeled back into the arms of those behind her, face blank with shock at the power with which he had seized her psyche. "Jessica, "she whispered. "Jessica."
   “I remember your gom jabbar,” Paul said. “You remember mine. I can kill you with a word.”
   The Fremen around the ball glanced knowingly at each other. Did the legend not say: “And his word shall carry death eternal to those who stand against righteousness.”
   Paul turned his attention to the tall Princess Royal standing beside her Emperor father. Keeping his eyes focused on her, he said: “Majesty, we both know the way out of our difficulty.”
   The Emperor glanced at his daughter, back to Paul. “You dare? You! An adventurer without family, a nobody from –”
   “You've already admitted who I am,” Paul said. “Royal kinsman, you said. Let's stop this nonsense.”
   “I am your ruler,” the Emperor said.
   Paul glanced at the Guildsmen standing now at the communications equipment and facing him. One of them nodded.
   “I could force it,” Paul said.
   “You will not dare!” the Emperor grated.
   Paul merely stared at him.
   The Princess Royal put a hand on her father's arm. “Father,” she said, and her voice was silky soft, soothing.
   “Don't try your tricks on me,” the Emperor said. He looked at her. “You don't need to do this, Daughter. We've other resources that –”
   “But here's a man fit to be your son,” she said.
   The old Reverend Mother, her composure regained, forced her way to the Emperor's side, leaned close to his ear and whispered.
   “She pleads your case,” Jessica said.
   Paul continued to look at the golden-haired Princess. Aside to his mother, he said: “That's Irulan, the oldest, isn't it?”
   “Yes.”
   Chani moved up on Paul's other side, said: “Do you wish me to leave, Muad'Dib?”
   He glanced at her. “Leave? You'll never again leave my side.”
   “There's nothing binding between us,” Chani said.
   Paul looked down at her for a silent moment, then: “Speak only truth with me, my Sihaya.” As she started to reply, he silenced her with a finger to her lips. “That which binds us cannot be loosed,” he said. “Now, watch these matters closely for I wish to see this room later through your wisdom.”
   The Emperor and his Truthsayer were carrying on a heated, low-voiced argument.
   Paul spoke to his mother: “She reminds him that it's part of their agreement to place a Bene Gesserit on the throne, and Irulan is the one they've groomed for it.”
   “Was that their plan?” Jessica said.
   “Isn't it obvious?” Paul asked.
   “I see the signs!” Jessica snapped. “My question was meant to remind you that you should not try to teach me those matters in which I instructed you.”
   Paul glanced at her, caught a cold smile on her lips.
   Gurney Halleck leaned between them, said: “I remind you, m'Lord, that there's a Harkonnen in that bunch.” He nodded toward the dark-haired Feyd-Rautha pressed against a barrier lance on the left. “The one with the squinting eyes there on the left. As evil a face as I ever say. You promised me once that –”
   “Thank you, Gurney,” Paul said.
   “It's the na-Baron . . . Baron now that the old man's dead,” Gurney said. “He'll do for what I've in –”
   “Can you take him, Gurney?” “M'Lord jests!”
   “That argument between the Emperor and his witch has gone on long enough, don't you think, Mother?”
   She nodded. “Indeed.”
   Paul raised his voice, called out to the Emperor: “Majesty, is there a Harkonnen among you?”
   Royal disdain revealed itself in the way the Emperor turned to look at Paul. “I believe my entourage has been placed under the protection of your ducal word,” he said.
   “My question was for information only,” Paul said. “I wish to know if a Harkonnen is officially a part of your entourage or if a Harkonnen is merely hiding behind a technicality out of cowardice.”
   The Emperor's smile was calculating. “Anyone accepted into the Imperial company is a member of my entourage.”
   “You have the word of a Duke,” Paul said, “but Muad'Dib is another matter. He may not recognize your definition of what constitutes an entourage. My friend Gurney Halleck wishes to kill a Harkonnen. If he –”
   “Kanly!” Feyd-Rautha shouted. He pressed against the barrier lance. “Your father named this vendetta, Atreides. You call me coward while you hide among your women and offer to send a lackey against me!”
   The old Truthsayer whispered something fiercely into the Emperor's ear, but he pushed her aside, said: “Kanly, is it? There are strict rules for kanly.”
   “Paul, put a stop to this,” Jessica said.
   “M'Lord,” Gurney said, “You promised me my day against the Harkonnens.”
   “You've had your day against them,” Paul said and he felt a harlequin abandon take over his emotions. He slipped his robe and hood from his shoulders, handed them to his mother with his belt and crysknife, began unstrapping his stillsuit. He sensed now that the universe focused on this moment.
   “There's no need for this,” Jessica said. “There are easier ways, Paul.”
   Paul stepped out of his stillsuit, slipped the crysknife from its sheath in his mother's hand. “I know,” he said. “Poison, an assassin, all the old familiar ways.”
   “You promised me a Harkonnen!” Gurney hissed, and Paul marked the rage in the man's face, the way the inkvine scar stood out dark and ridged. “You owe it to me, m'Lord!”
   “Have you suffered more from them than I?” Paul asked.
   “My sister,” Gurney rasped. “My years in the slave pits –”
   “My father,” Paul said. “My good friends and companions, Thufir Hawat and Duncan Idaho, my years as a fugitive without rank or succor . . . and one more thing: it is now kanly and you know as well as I the rules that must prevail.”
   Halleck's shoulders sagged. “M'Lord, if that swine . . . he's no more than a beast you'd spurn with your foot and discard the shoe because it'd been contaminated. Call in an executioner, if you must, or let me do it, but don't offer yourself to –”
   “Muad'Dib need not do this thing,” Chani said.
   He glanced at her, saw the fear for him in her eyes. “But the Duke Paul must,” he said.
   “This is a Harkonnen animal!” Gurney rasped.
   Paul hesitated on the point of revealing his own Harkonnen ancestry, stopped at a sharp look from his mother, said merely: “But this being has human shape, Gurney, and deserves human doubt.”
   Gurney said: “If he so much as –”
   “Please stand aside,” Paul said. He hefted the crysknife, pushed Gurney gently aside.
   “Gurney!” Jessica said. She touched Gurney's arm. “He's like his grandfather in this mood. Don't distract him. It's the only thing you can do for him now.” And she thought: Great Mother! What irony.
   The Emperor was studying Feyd-Rautha, seeing the heavy shoulders, the thick muscles. He turned to look at Paul – a stringy whipcord of a youth, not as desiccated as the Arrakeen natives, but with ribs there to count, and sunken in the flanks so that the ripple and gather of muscles could be followed under the skin.
   Jessica leaned close to Paul, pitched her voice for his ears alone: “One thing, Son. Sometimes a dangerous person is prepared by the Bene Gesserit, a word implanted into the deepest recesses by the old pleasure-pain methods. The word-sound most frequently used is Uroshnor. If this one's been prepared, as I strongly suspect, that word uttered in his ear will render his muscles flaccid and –”
   “I want no special advantage for this one,” Paul said. “Step back out of my way.”
   Gurney spoke to her: “Why is he doing this? Does he think to get himself killed and achieve martyrdom? This Fremen religious prattle, is that what clouds his reason?”
   Jessica hid her face in her hands, realizing that she did not know fully why Paul took this course. She could feel death in the room and knew that the changed Paul was capable of such a thing as Gurney suggested. Every talent within her focused on the need to protect her son, but there was nothing she could do.
   “Is it this religious prattle?” Gurney insisted.
   “Be silent,” Jessica whispered. “And pray.”
   The Emperor's face was touched by an abrupt smile. “If Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen . . . of my entourage . . . so wishes,” he said, “I relieve him of all restraint and give him freedom to choose his own course in this.” The Emperor waved a hand toward Paul's Fedaykin guards. “One of your rabble has my belt and short blade. If Feyd-Rautha wishes it, he may meet you with my blade in his hand.”
   “I wish it,” Feyd-Rautha said, and Paul saw the elation on the man's face.
   He's overconfident, Paul thought. There's a natural advantage I can accept.
   “Get the Emperor's blade,” Paul said, and watched as his command was obeyed. “Put it on the floor there.” He indicated a place with his foot. “Clear the Imperial rabble back against the wall and let the Harkonnen stand clear.”
   A flurry of robes, scraping of feet, low-voiced commands and protests accompanied obedience to Paul's command. The Guildsmen remained standing near the communications equipment. They frowned at Paul in obvious indecision.
   They're accustomed to seeing the future, Paul thought. In this place and time they're blind . . . even as I am. And he sampled the time-winds, sensing the turmoil, the storm nexus that now focused on this moment place. Even the faint gaps were closed now. Here was the unborn jihad, he knew. Here was the race consciousness that he had known once as his own terrible purpose. Here was reason enough for a Kwisatz Haderach or a Lisan al-Gaib or even the halting schemes of the Bene Gesserit. The race of humans had felt its own dormancy, sensed itself grown stale and knew now only the need to experience turmoil in which the genes would mingle and the strong new mixtures survive. All humans were alive as an unconscious single organism in this moment, experiencing a kind of sexual heat that could override any barrier.
   And Paul saw how futile were any efforts of his to change any smallest bit of this. He had thought to oppose the jihad within himself, but the jihad would be. His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him. They needed only the legend he already had become. He had shown them the way, given them mastery even over the Guild which must have the spice to exist.
   A sense of failure pervaded him, and he saw through it that Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen had slipped out of the torn uniform, stripped down to a fighting girdle with a mail core.
   This is the climax, Paul thought. From here, the future will open, the clouds part onto a kind of glory. And if I die here, they'll say I sacrificed myself that my spirit might lead them. And if I live, they'll say nothing can oppose Muad'Dib.
   “Is the Atreides ready?” Feyd-Rautha called, using the words of the ancient kanly ritual.
   Paul chose to answer him in the Fremen way: “May thy knife chip and shatter!” He pointed to the Emperor's blade on the floor, indicating that Feyd-Rautha should advance and take it.
   Keeping his attention on Paul, Feyd-Rautha picked up the knife, balancing it a moment in his hand to get the feel of it. Excitement kindled in him. This was a fight he had dreamed about – man against man, skill against skill with no shields intervening. He could see a way to power opening before him because the Emperor surely would reward whoever killed this troublesome duke. The reward might even be that haughty daughter and a share of the throne. And this yokel duke, this back-world adventurer could not possibly be a match for a Harkonnen trained in every device and every treachery by a thousand arena combats. And the yokel had no way of knowing he faced more weapons than a knife here.
   Let us see if you're proof against poison! Feyd-Rautha thought. He saluted Paul with the Emperor's blade, said: “Meet your death, fool.”
   “Shall we fight, cousin?” Paul asked. And he cat-footed forward, eyes on the waiting blade, his body crouched low with his own milk-white crysknife pointing out as though an extension of his arm.
   They circled each other, bare feet grating on the floor, watching with eyes intent for the slightest opening.
   “How beautifully you dance,” Feyd-Rautha said.
   He's a talker, Paul thought. There's another weakness. He grows uneasy in the face of silence.
   “Have you been shriven?” Feyd-Rautha asked.
   Still, Paul circled in silence.
   And the old Reverend Mother, watching the fight from the press of the Emperor's suite, felt herself trembling. The Atreides youth had called the Harkonnen cousin. It could only mean he knew the ancestry they shared, easy to understand because he was the Kwisatz Haderach. But the words forced her to focus on the only thing that mattered to her here.
   This could be a major catastrophe for the Bene Gesserit breeding scheme.
   She had seen something of what Paul had seen here, that Feyd-Rautha might kill but not be victorious. Another thought, though, almost overwhelmed her. Two end products of this long and costly program faced each other in a fight to the death that might easily claim both of them. If both died here that would leave only Feyd-Rautha's bastard daughter, still a baby, an unknown, an unmeasured factor, and Alia, the abomination.
   “Perhaps you have only pagan rites here,” Feyd-Rautha said. “Would you like the Emperor's Truthsayer to prepare your spirit for its journey?”
   Paul smiled, circling to the right, alert, his black thoughts suppressed by the needs of the moment.
   Feyd-Rautha leaped, feinting with right hand, but with the knife shifted in a blur to his left hand.
   Paul dodged easily, noting the shield-conditioned hesitation in Feyd-Rautha's thrust. Still, it was not as great a shield conditioning as some Paul had seen, and he sensed that Feyd-Rautha had fought before against unshielded foes.
   “Does an Atreides run or stand and fight?” Feyd-Rautha asked.
   Paul resumed his silent circling. Idaho's words came back to him, the words of training from the long-ago practice floor on Caladan: “Use the first moments in study. You may miss many an opportunity for quick victory this way, but the moments of study are insurance of success. Take your time and be sure.”
   “Perhaps you think this dance prolongs your life a few moments,” Feyd-Rautha said. “Well and good.” He stopped the circling, straightened.
   Paul had seen enough for a first approximation. Feyd-Rautha led to the left side, presenting the right hip as though the mailed fighting girdle could protect his entire side. It was the action of a man trained to the shield and with a knife in both hands.
   Or . . . And Paul hesitated . . . the girdle was more than it seemed.
   The Harkonnen appeared too confident against a man who'd this day led the forces of victory against Sardaukar legions.
   Feyd-Rautha noted the hesitation, said: “Why prolong the inevitable? You but keep me from exercising my rights over this ball of dirt.”
   If it's a flip-dart, Paul thought, it's a cunning one. The girdle shows no signs of tampering.
   “Why don't you speak?” Feyd-Rautha demanded.
   Paul resumed his probing circle, allowing himself a cold smile at the tone of unease in Feyd-Rautha's voice, evidence that the pressure of silence was building.
   “You smile, eh?” Feyd-Rautha asked. And he leaped in mid-sentence.
   Expecting the slight hesitation, Paul almost failed to evade the downflash of blade, felt its tip scratch his left arm. He silenced the sudden pain there, his mind flooded with realization that the earlier hesitation had been a trick – an overfeint. Here was more of an opponent than he had expected. There would be tricks within tricks within tricks.
   “Your own Thufir Hawat taught me some of my skills,” Feyd-Rautha said. “He gave me first blood. Too bad the old fool didn't live to see it.”
   And Paul recalled that Idaho had once said, “Expect only what happens in the fight. That way you'll never be surprised.”
   Again the two circled each other, crouched, cautious.
   Paul saw the return of elation to his opponent, wondered at it. Did a scratch signify that much to the man? Unless there were poison on the blade! But how could there be? His own men had handled the weapon, snooped it before passing it. They were too well trained to miss an obvious thing like that.
   “That woman you were talking to over there,” Feyd-Rautha said. “The little one. Is she something special to you? A pet perhaps? Will she deserve my special attentions?”
   Paul remained silent, probing with his inner senses, examining the blood from the wound, finding a trace of soporific from the Emperor's blade. He realigned his own metabolism to match this threat and change the molecules of the soporific, but he felt a thrill of doubt. They'd been prepared with soporific on a blade. A soporific. Nothing to alert a poison snooper, but strong enough to slow the muscles it touched. His enemies had their own plans within plans, their own stacked treacheries.
   Again Feyd-Rautha leaped, stabbing.
   Paul, the smile frozen on his face, feinted with slowness as though inhibited by the drug and at the last instant dodged to meet the downflashing arm on the crysknife's point.
   Feyd-Rautha ducked sideways and was out and away, his blade shifted to his left hand, and the measure of him that only a slight paleness of jaw betrayed the acid pain where Paul had cut him.
   Let him know his own moment of doubt, Paul thought. Let him suspect poison.
   “Treachery!” Feyd-Rautha shouted. “He's poisoned me! I do feel poison in my arm!”
   Paul dropped his cloak of silence, said: “Only a little acid to counter the soporific on the Emperor's blade.”
   Feyd-Rautha matched Paul's cold smile, lifted blade in left hand for a mock salute. His eyes glared rage behind the knife.
   Paul shifted his crysknife to his left hand, matching his opponent. Again, they circled, probing.
   Feyd-Rautha began closing the space between them, edging in, knife held high, anger showing itself in squint of eye and set of jaw. He feinted right and under, and they were pressed against each other, knife hands gripped, straining.
   Paul, cautious of Feyd-Rautha's right hip where he suspected a poison flip-dart, forced the turn to the right. He almost failed to see the needlepoint flick out beneath the belt line. A shift and a giving in Feyd-Rautha's motion warned him. The tiny point missed Paul's flesh by the barest fraction.
   On the left hip!
   Treachery within treachery within treachery, Paul reminded himself. Using Bene Gesserit-trained muscles, he sagged to catch a reflex in Feyd-Rautha, but the necessity of avoiding the tiny point jutting from his opponent's hip threw Paul off just enough that he missed his footing and found himself thrown hard to the floor, Feyd-Rautha on top.
   “You see it there on my hip?” Feyd-Rautha whispered. “Your death, fool.” And he began twisting himself around, forcing the poisoned needle closer and closer. “It'll stop your muscles and my knife will finish you. There'll be never a trace left to detect!”
   Paul strained, hearing the silent screams in his mind, his cell-stamped ancestors demanding that he use the secret word to slow Feyd-Rautha, to save himself.
   “I will not say it!” Paul gasped.
   Feyd-Rautha gaped at him, caught in the merest fraction of hesitation. It was enough for Paul to find the weakness of balance in one of his opponent's leg muscles, and their positions were reversed. Feyd-Rautha lay partly underneath with right hip high, unable to turn because of the tiny needlepoint caught against the floor beneath him.
   Paul twisted his left hand free, aided by the lubrication of blood from his arm, thrust once hard up underneath Feyd-Rautha's jaw. The point slid home into the brain. Feyd-Rautha jerked and sagged back, still held partly on his side by the needle imbedded in the floor.
   Breathing deeply to restore his calm, Paul pushed himself away and got to his feet. He stood over the body, knife in hand, raised his eyes with deliberate slowness to look across the room at the Emperor.
   “Majesty,” Paul said, “your force is reduced by one more. Shall we now shed sham and pretense? Shall we now discuss what must be? Your daughter wed to me and the way opened for an Atreides to sit on the throne.”
   The Emperor turned, looked at Count Fenring. The Count met his stare – gray eyes against green. The thought lay there clearly between them, their association so long that understanding could be achieved with a glance.
   Kill this upstart for me, the Emperor was saying. The Atreides is young and resourceful, yes – but he is also tired from long effort and he'd be no match for you, anyway. Call him out now . . . you know the way of it. Kill him.
   Slowly, Fenring moved his head, a prolonged turning until he faced Paul.
   “Do it!” the Emperor hissed.
   The Count focused on Paul, seeing with eyes his Lady Margot had trained in the Bene Gesserit way, aware of the mystery and hidden grandeur about this Atreides youth.
   I could kill him, Fenring thought – and he knew this for a truth.
   Something in his own secretive depths stayed the Count then, and he glimpsed briefly, inadequately, the advantage he held over Paul – a way of hiding from the youth, a furtiveness of person and motives that no eye could penetrate.
   Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern – a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he'd ever experienced.
   Fenring, reading Paul's emotion, said, “Majesty, I must refuse.”
   Rage overcame Shaddam IV. He took two short steps through the entourage, cuffed Fenring viciously across the jaw.
   A dark flush spread up and over the Count's face. He looked directly at the Emperor, spoke with deliberate lack of emphasis: “We have been friends, Majesty. What I do now is out of friendship. I shall forget that you struck me.”
   Paul cleared his throat, said: “We were speaking of the throne, Majesty.”
   The Emperor whirled, glared at Paul. “I sit on the throne!” he barked.
   “You shall have a throne on Salusa Secundus,” Paul said.
   “I put down my arms and came here on your word of bond!” the Emperor shouted. “You dare threaten –”
   “Your person is safe in my presence,” Paul said. “An Atreides promised it. Muad'Dib, however, sentences you to your prison planet. But have no fear, Majesty. I will ease the harshness of the place with all the powers at my disposal. It shall become a garden world, full of gentle things.”
   As the hidden import of Paul's words grew in the Emperor's mind, he glared across the room at Paul. “Now we see true motives,” he sneered.
   “Indeed,” Paul said.
   “And what of Arrakis?” the Emperor asked. “Another garden world full of gentle things?”
   “The Fremen have the word of Muad'Dib,” Paul said. “There will be flowing water here open to the sky and green oases rich with good things. But we have the spice to think of, too. Thus, there will always be desert on Arrakis . . . and fierce winds, and trials to toughen a man. We Fremen have a saying: 'God created Arrakis to train the faithful.' One cannot go against the word of God.”
   The old Truthsayer, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, had her own view of the hidden meaning in Paul's words now. She glimpsed the jihad and said: “You cannot loose these people upon the universe!”
   “You will think back to the gentle ways of the Sardaukar!” Paul snapped.
   “You cannot,” she whispered.
   “You're a Truthsayer,” Paul said. “Review your words.” He glanced at the Princess Royal, back to the Emperor. “Best be done quickly, Majesty.”
   The Emperor turned a stricken look upon his daughter. She touched his arm, spoke soothingly: “For this I was trained, Father.”
   He took a deep breath.
   “You cannot stay this thing,” the old Truthsayer muttered.
   The Emperor straightened, standing stiffly with a look of remembered dignity. “Who will negotiate for you, kinsman?” he asked.
   Paul turned, saw his mother, her eyes heavy-lidded, standing with Chani in a squad of Fedaykin guards. He crossed to them, stood looking down at Chani.
   “I know the reasons,” Chani whispered. “If it must be . . . Usul.”
   Paul, hearing the secret tears in her voice, touched her cheek. “My Sihaya need fear nothing, ever,” he whispered. He dropped his arm, faced his mother. “You will negotiate for me. Mother, with Chani by your side. She has wisdom and sharp eyes. And it is wisely said that no one bargains tougher than a Fremen. She will be looking through the eyes of her love for me and with the thought of her sons to be, what they will need. Listen to her.”
   Jessica sensed the harsh calculation in her son, put down a shudder. “What are your instructions?” she asked.
   “The Emperor's entire CHOAM Company holdings as dowry,” he said.
   “Entire?” She was shocked almost speechless.
   “He is to be stripped. I'll want an earldom and CHOAM directorship for Gurney Halleck, and him in the fief of Caladan. There will be titles and attendant power for every surviving Atreides man, not excepting the lowliest trooper.”
   “What of the Fremen?” Jessica asked.
   “The Fremen are mine,” Paul said. “What they receive shall be dispensed by Muad'Dib. It'll begin with Stilgar as Governor on Arrakis, but that can wait.”
   “And for me?” Jessica asked.
   “Is there something you wish?”
   “Perhaps Caladan,” she said, looking at Gurney. “I'm not certain. I've become too much the Fremen . . . and the Reverend Mother. I need a time of peace and stillness in which to think.”
   “That you shall have,” Paul said, “and anything else that Gurney or I can give you.”
   Jessica nodded, feeling suddenly old and tired. She looked at Chani. “And for the royal concubine?”
   “No title for me,” Chani whispered. “Nothing. I beg of you.”
   Paul stared down into her eyes, remembering her suddenly as she had stood once with little Leto in her arms, their child now dead in this violence. “I swear to you now,” he whispered, “that you'll need no title. That woman over there will be my wife and you but a concubine because this is a political thing and we must weld peace out of this moment, enlist the Great Houses of the Landsraad. We must obey the forms. Yet that princess shall have no more of me than my name. No child of mine nor touch nor softness of glance, nor instant of desire.”
   “So you say now,” Chani said. She glanced across the room at the tail princess.
   “Do you know so little of my son?” Jessica whispered. “See that princess standing there, so haughty and confident. They say she has pretensions of a literary nature. Let us hope she finds solace in such things; she'll have little else.” A bitter laugh escaped Jessica. “Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine – never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine – history will call us wives.”

= = = = = =

   He was warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man. There is no measuring Muad'Dib's motives by ordinary standards. In the moment of his triumph, he saw the death prepared for him, yet he accepted the treachery. Can you say he did this out of a sense of justice? Whose justice, then? Remember, we speak now of the Muad'Dib who ordered battle drums made from his enemies' skins, the Muad'Dib who denied the conventions of his ducal past with a wave of the hand, saying merely: "I am the Kwisatz Haderach. That is reason enough. "
   –from “Arrakis Awakening” by the Princess Irulan

   It was to the Arrakeen governor's mansion, the old Residency the Atreides had first occupied on Dune, that they escorted Paul-Muad'Dib on the evening of his victory. The building stood as Rabban had restored it, virtually untouched by the fighting although there had been looting by townspeople. Some of the furnishings in the main hall had been overturned or smashed.
   Paul strode through the main entrance with Gurney Halleck and Stilgar a pace behind. Their escort fanned out into the Great Hall, straightening the place and clearing an area for Muad'Dib. One squad began investigating that no sly trap had been planted here.
   “I remember the day we first came here with your father,” Gurney said. He glanced around at the beams and the high, slitted windows. “I didn't like this place then and I like it less now. One of our caves would be safer.”
   “Spoken like a true Fremen,” Stilgar said, and he marked the cold smile that his words brought to Muad'Dib's lips. “Will you reconsider, Muad'Dib?”
   “This place is a symbol,” Paul said. “Rabban lived here. By occupying this place I seal my victory for all to understand. Send men through the building. Touch nothing. Just be certain no Harkonnen people or toys remain.”
   “As you command,” Stilgar said, and reluctance was heavy in his tone as he turned to obey.
   Communications men hurried into the room with their equipment, began setting up near the massive fireplace. The Fremen guard that augmented the surviving Fedaykin took up stations around the room. There was muttering among them, much darting of suspicious glances. This had been too long a place of the enemy for them to accept their presence in it casually.
   “Gurney, have an escort bring my mother and Chani,” Paul said. “Does Chani know yet about our son?”
   “The message was sent, m'Lord.”
   “Are the makers being taken out of the basin yet?”
   “Yes, m'Lord. The storm's almost spent.”
   “What's the extent of the storm damage?” Paul asked.
   “In the direct path – on the landing field and across the spice storage yards of the plain – extensive damage,” Gurney said. “As much from battle as from the storm.”
   “Nothing money won't repair, I presume,” Paul said.
   “Except for the lives, m'Lord,” Gurney said, and there was a tone of reproach in his voice as though to say: “When did an Atreides worry first about things when people were at stake?”
   But Paul could only focus his attention on the inner eye and the gaps visible to him in the time-wall that still lay across his path. Through each gap the jihad raged away down the corridors of the future.
   He sighed, crossed the hall, seeing a chair against the wall. The chair had once stood in the dining hall and might even have held his own father. At the moment, though, it was only an object to rest his weariness and conceal it from the men. He sat down, pulling his robes around his legs, loosening his stillsuit at the neck.
   “The Emperor is still holed up in the remains of his ship,” Gurney said.
   “For now, contain him there,” Paul said. “Have they found the Harkonnens yet?”
   “They're still examining the dead.”
   “What reply from the ships up there?” He jerked his chin toward the ceiling.
   “No reply yet, m'Lord.”
   Paul sighed, resting against the back of his chair. Presently, he said: “Bring me a captive Sardaukar. We must send a message to our Emperor, It's time to discuss terms.”
   “Yes, m'Lord.”
   Gurney turned away, dropped a hand signal to one of the Fedaykin who took up close-guard position beside Paul.
   “Gurney,” Paul whispered. “Since we've been rejoined I've yet to hear you produce the proper quotation for the event.” He turned, saw Gurney swallow, saw the sudden grim hardening of the man's jaw.
   “As you wish, m'Lord,” Gurney said. He cleared his throat, rasped: " 'And the victory that day was turned into mourning unto all the people: for the people heard say that day how the king was grieved for his son.' "
   Paul closed his eyes, forcing grief out of his mind, letting it wait as he had once waited to mourn his father. Now, he gave his thoughts over to this day's accumulated discoveries – the mixed futures and the hidden presence of Alia within his awareness.
   Of all the uses of time-vision, this was the strangest. “I have breasted the future to place my words where only you can hear them,” Alia had said. “Even you cannot do that, my brother. I find it an interesting play. And . . . oh, yes – I've killed our grandfather, the demented old Baron. He had very little pain.”
   Silence. His time sense had seen her withdrawal.
   “Muad'Dib.”
   Paul opened his eyes to see Stilgar's black-bearded visage above him, the dark eyes glaring with battle light.
   “You've found the body of the old Baron,” Paul said.
   A hush of the person settled over Stilgar. “How could you know?” he whispered. “We just found the body in that great pile of metal the Emperor built.”
   Paul ignored the question, seeing Gurney return accompanied by two Fremen who supported a captive Sardaukar.
   “Here's one of them, m'Lord,” Gurney said. He signed to the guard to hold the captive five paces in front of Paul.
   The Sardaukar's eyes, Paul noted, carried a glazed expression of shock. A blue bruise stretched from the bridge of his nose to the corner of his mouth. He was of the blond, chisel-featured caste, the look that seemed synonymous with rank among the Sardaukar, yet there were no insignia on his torn uniform except the gold buttons with the Imperial crest and the tattered braid of his trousers.
   “I think this one's an officer, m'Lord,” Gurney said.
   Paul nodded, said: “I am the Duke Paul Atreides. Do you understand that, man?”
   The Sardaukar stared at him unmoving.
   “Speak up,” Paul said, “or your Emperor may die.”
   The man blinked, swallowed.
   “Who am I?” Paul demanded.
   “You are the Duke Paul Atreides,” the man husked.
   He seemed too submissive to Paul, but then the Sardaukar had never been prepared for such happenings as this day. They'd never known anything but victory which, Paul realized, could be a weakness in itself. He put that thought aside for later consideration in his own training program.
   “I have a message for you to carry to the Emperor,” Paul said. And he couched his words in the ancient formula: “I, a Duke of a Great House, an Imperial Kinsman, give my word of bond under the Convention. If the Emperor and his people lay down their arms and come to me here I will guard their lives with my own.” Paul held up his left hand with the ducal signet for the Sardaukar to see. “I swear it by this.”
   The man wet his lips with his tongue, glanced at Gurney.
   “Yes,” Paul said. “Who but an Atreides could command the allegiance of Gurney Halleck.”
   “I will carry the message,” the Sardaukar said.
   “Take him to our forward command post and send him in,” Paul said.
   “Yes, m'Lord.” Gurney motioned for the guard to obey, led them out.
   Paul turned back to Stilgar.
   “Chani and your mother have arrived,” Stilgar said. “Chani has asked time to be alone with her grief. The Reverend Mother sought a moment in the weirding room; I know not why.”
   “My mother's sick with longing for a planet she may never see,” Paul said. “Where water falls from the sky and plants grow so thickly you cannot walk between them.”
   “Water from the sky,” Stilgar whispered.
   In that instant, Paul saw how Stilgar had been transformed from the Fremen naib to a creature of the Lisan al-Gaib, a receptacle for awe and obedience. It was a lessening of the man, and Paul felt the ghost-wind of the jihad in it.
   I have seen a friend become a worshiper, he thought.
   In a rush of loneliness, Paul glanced around the room, noting how proper and on-review his guards had become in his presence. He sensed the subtle, prideful competition among them – each hoping for notice from Muad'Dib.
   Muad'Dib from whom all blessings flow, he thought, and it was the bitterest thought of his life. They sense that I must take the throne, he thought. But they cannot know I do it to prevent the jihad.
   Stilgar cleared his throat, said: “Rabban, too, is dead.”
   Paul nodded.
   Guards to the right suddenly snapped aside, standing at attention to open an aisle for Jessica. She wore her black aba and walked with a hint of striding across sand, but Paul noted how this house had restored to her something of what she had once been here – concubine to a ruling duke. Her presence carried some of its old assertiveness.
   Jessica stopped in front of Paul, looked down at him. She saw his fatigue and how he hid it, but found no compassion for him. It was as though she had been rendered incapable of any emotion for her son.
   Jessica had entered the Great Hall wondering why the place refused to fit itself snugly in to her memories. It remained a foreign room, as though she had never walked here, never walked here with her beloved Leto, never confronted a drunken Duncan Idaho here – never, never, never . . .
   There should be a word-tension directly opposite to adab, the demanding memory, she thought. There should be a word for memories that deny themselves.
   “Where is Alia?” she asked.
   “Out doing what any good Fremen child should be doing in such times,” Paul said. “She's killing enemy wounded and marking their bodies for the water-recovery teams.”
   “Paul!”
   “You must understand that she does this out of kindness,” he said. “Isn't it odd how we misunderstand the hidden unity of kindness and cruelty?”
   Jessica glared at her son, shocked by the profound change in him. Was it his child's death did this? she wondered. And she said: “The men tell strange stories of you, Paul. They say you've all the powers of the legend – nothing can be hidden from you, that you see where others cannot see.”
   “A Bene Gesserit should ask about legends?” he asked.
   “I've had a hand in whatever you are,” she admitted, “but you mustn't expect me to –”
   “How would you like to live billions upon billions of lives?” Paul asked. “There's a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they'd bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn't it? And it puts a new shape on hate. How can you tell what's ruthless unless you've plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness? You should fear me, Mother. I am the Kwisatz Haderach.”
   Jessica tried to swallow in a dry throat. Presently, she said; “Once you denied to me that you were the Kwisatz Haderach.”
   Paul shook his head. “I can deny nothing any more.” He looked up into her eyes. “The Emperor and his people come now. They will be announced any moment. Stand beside me. I wish a clear view of them. My future bride will be among them.”
   “Paul!” Jessica snapped. “Don't make the mistake your father made!”
   “She's a princess,” Paul said. “She's my key to the throne, and that's all she'll ever be. Mistake? You think because I'm what you made me that I cannot feel the need for revenge?”
   “Even on the innocent?” she asked, and she thought: He must not make the mistakes I made.
   “There are no innocent any more,” Paul said.
   “Tell that to Chani,” Jessica said, and gestured toward the passage from the rear of the Residency.
   Chani entered the Great Hall there, walking between the Fremen guards as though unaware of them. Her hood and stillsuit cap were thrown back, face mask fastened aside. She walked with a fragile uncertainty as she crossed the room to stand beside Jessica.
   Paul saw the marks of tears on her cheeks – She gives water to the dead. He felt a pang of grief strike through him, but it was as though he could only feel this thing through Chani's presence.
   “He is dead, beloved,” Chani said. “Our son is dead.”
   Holding himself under stiff control, Paul got to his feet. He reached out, touched Chani's cheek, feeling the dampness of her tears. “He cannot be replaced,” Paul said, “but there will be other sons. It is Usul who promises this.” Gently, he moved her aside, gestured to Stilgar.
   “Muad'Dib,” Stilgar said.
   “They come from the ship, the Emperor and his people,” Paul said. “I will stand here. Assemble the captives in an open space in, the center of the room. They will be kept at a distance of ten meters from me unless I command otherwise.”
   “As you command, Muad'Dib.”
   As Stilgar turned to obey, Paul heard the awed muttering of Fremen guards: “You see? He knew! No one told him, but he knew!”
   The Emperor's entourage could be heard approaching now, his Sardaukar humming one of their marching tunes to keep up their spirits. There came a murmur of voices at the entrance and Gurney Halleck passed through the guard, crossed to confer with Stilgar, then moved to Paul's side, a strange look in His eyes.
   Will I lose Gurney, too? Paul wondered. The way I lost Stilgar – losing a friend to gain a creature?
   “They have no throwing weapons,” Gurney said. “I've made sure of that myself.” He glanced around the room, seeing Paul's preparations. “Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen is with them. Shall I cut him out?”
   “Leave him.”
   “There're some Guild people, too, demanding special privileges, threatening an embargo against Arrakis. I told them I'd give you their message.”
   “Let them threaten.”
   “Paul!” Jessica hissed behind him. “He's talking about the Guild!”
   “I'll pull their fangs presently,” Paul said.
   And he thought then about the Guild – the force that had specialized for so long that it had become a parasite, unable to exist independently of the life upon which it fed. They had never dared grasp the sword . . . and now they could not grasp it. They might have taken Arrakis when they realized the error of specializing on the melange awareness-spectrum narcotic for their navigators. They could have done this, lived their glorious day and died. Instead, they'd existed from moment to moment, hoping the seas in which they swam might produce a new host when the old one died.
   The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they'd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.
   Let them look closely at their new host, Paul thought.
   “There's also a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother who says she's a friend of your mother,” Gurney said.
   “My mother has no Bene Gesserit friends.”
   Again, Gurney glanced around the Great Hall, then bent close to Paul's ear. “Thufir Hawat's with 'em, m'Lord. I had no chance to see him alone, but he used our old hand signs to say he's been working with the Harkonnens, thought you were dead. Says he's to be left among 'em.”
   “You left Thufir among those –”
   “He wanted it . . . and I thought it best. If . . . there's something wrong, he's where we can control him. If not – we've an ear on the other side.”
   Paul thought then of prescient glimpses into the possibilities of this moment – and one time-line where Thufir carried a poisoned needle which the Emperor commanded he use against “this upstart Duke.”
   The entrance guards stepped aside, formed a short corridor of lances. There came a murmurous swish of garments, feet rasping the sand that had drifted into the Residency.
   The Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV led his people into the hall. His burseg helmet had been lost and the red hair stood out in disarray. His uniform's left sleeve had been ripped along the inner seam. He was beltless and without weapons, but his presence moved with him like a force-shield bubble that kept his immediate area open.
   A Fremen lance dropped across his path, stopped him where Paul had ordered. The others bunched up behind, a montage of color, of shuffling and of staring faces.
   Paul swept his gaze across the group, saw women who hid signs of weeping, saw the lackeys who had come to enjoy grandstand seats at a Sardaukar victory and now stood choked to silence by defeat. Paul saw the bird-bright eyes of the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam glaring beneath her black hood, and beside her the narrow furtiveness of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen.
   There's a face time betrayed to me, Paul thought.
   He looked beyond Feyd-Rautha then, attracted by a movement, seeing there a narrow, weaselish face he'd never before encountered – not in time or out of it. It was a face he felt he should know and the feeling carried with it a marker of fear.
   Why should I fear that man? he wondered.
   He leaned toward his mother, whispered: “That man to the left of the Reverend Mother, the evil-looking one – who is that?”
   Jessica looked, recognizing the face from her Duke's dossiers. “Count Fenring,” she said. “The one who was here immediately before us. A genetic-eunuch . . . and a killer.”
   The Emperor's errand boy, Paul thought. And the thought was a shock crashing across his consciousness because he had seen the Emperor in uncounted associations spread through the possible futures–but never once had Count Fenring appeared within those prescient visions.
   It occurred to Paul then that he had seen his own dead body along countless reaches of the time web, but never once had he seen his moment of death.
   Have I been denied a glimpse of this man because he is the one who kills me? Paul wondered.
   The thought sent a pang of foreboding through him. He forced his attention away from Fenring, looked now at the remnants of Sardaukar men and officers, the bitterness on their faces and the desperation. Here and there among them, faces caught Paul's attention briefly: Sardaukar officers measuring the preparations within this room, planning and scheming yet for a way to turn defeat into victory.
   Paul's attention came at last to a tall blonde woman, green-eyed, a face of patrician beauty, classic in its hauteur, untouched by tears, completely undefeated. Without being told it, Paul knew her – Princess Royal, Bene Gesserit – trained, a face that time vision had shown him in many aspects: Irulan.
   There's my key, he thought.
   Then he saw movement in the clustered people, a face and figure emerged – Thufir Hawat, the seamed old features with darkly stained lips, the hunched shoulders, the look of fragile age about him.
   “There's Thufir Hawat,” Paul said. “Let him stand free, Gurney.”
   “M'Lord,” Gurney said.
   “Let him stand free,” Paul repeated.
   Gurney nodded.
   Hawat shambled forward as a Fremen lance was lifted and replaced behind him. The rheumy eyes peered at Paul, measuring, seeking.
   Paul stepped forward one pace, sensed the tense, waiting movement of the Emperor and his people.
   Hawat's gaze stabbed past Paul, and the old man said: “Lady Jessica, I but learned this day how I've wronged you in my thoughts. You needn't forgive.”
   Paul waited, but his mother remained silent.
   “Thufir, old friend,” Paul said, “as you can see, my back is toward no door.”
   “The universe is full of doors,” Hawat said.
   “Am I my father's son?” Paul asked.
   “More like your grandfather's,” Hawat rasped. “You've his manner and the look of him in your eyes.”
   “Yet I'm my father's son,” Paul said. “For I say to you, Thufir, that in payment for your years of service to my family you may now ask anything you wish of me. Anything at all. Do you need my life now, Thufir? It is yours.” Paul stepped forward a pace, hands at his side, seeing the look of awareness grow in Hawat's eyes.
   He realizes that I know of the treachery, Paul thought.
   Pitching his voice to carry in a half-whisper for Hawat's ears alone, Paul said: “I mean this, Thufir. If you're to strike me, do it now.”
   “I but wanted to stand before you once more, my Duke,” Hawat said. And Paul became aware for the first time of the effort the old man exerted to keep from falling. Paul reached out, supported Hawat by the shoulders, feeling the muscle tremors beneath his hands.
   “Is there pain, old friend?” Paul asked.
   “There is pain, my Duke,” Hawat agreed, “but the pleasure is greater.” He half turned in Paul's arms, extended his left hand, palm up, toward the Emperor, exposing the tiny needle cupped against the fingers. “See, Majesty?” he called. “See your traitor's needle? Did you think that I who've given my life to service of the Atreides would give them less now?”
   Paul staggered as the old man sagged in his arms, felt the death there, the utter flaccidity. Gently, Paul lowered Hawat to the floor, straightened and signed for guardsmen to carry the body away.
   Silence held the hall while his command was obeyed.
   A look of deadly waiting held the Emperor's face now. Eyes that had never admitted fear admitted it at last.
   “Majesty,” Paul said, and noted the jerk of surprised attention in the tall Princess Royal. The words had been uttered with the Bene Gesserit controlled atonals, carrying in it every shade of contempt and scorn that Paul could put there.
   Bene-Gesserit trained indeed, Paul thought.
   The Emperor cleared his throat, said: “Perhaps my respected kinsman believes he has things all his own way now. Nothing could be more remote from fact. You have violated the Convention, used atomics against –”
   “I used atomics against a natural feature of the desert,” Paul said. “It was in my way and I was in a hurry to get to you, Majesty, to ask your explanation for some of your strange activities.”
   “There's a massed armada of the Great Houses in space over Arrakis right now,” the Emperor said. “I've but to say the word and they'll –”
   “Oh, yes,” Paul said, “I almost forgot about them.” He searched through the Emperor's suite until he saw the faces of the two Guildsmen, spoke aside to Gurney. “Are those the Guild agents, Gurney, the two fat ones dressed in gray over there?”
   “Yes, m'Lord.”
   “You two,” Paul said, pointing. “Get out of there immediately and dispatch messages that will get that fleet on its way home. After this, you'll ask my permission before –”
   “The Guild doesn't take your orders!” the taller of the two barked. He and his companion pushed through to the barrier lances, which were raised at a nod from Paul. The two men stepped out and the taller leveled an arm at Paul, said: “You may very well be under embargo for your –”
   “If I hear any more nonsense from either of you,” Paul said, “I'll give the order that'll destroy all spice production on Arrakis . . . forever.”
   “Are you mad?” the tall Guildsman demanded. He fell back half a step.
   “You grant that I have the power to do this thing, then?” Paul asked.
   The Guildsman seemed to stare into space for a moment, then: “Yes, you could do it, but you must not.”
   “Ah-h-h,” Paul said and nodded to himself. “Guild navigators, both of you, eh?”
   “Yes!”
   The shorter of the pair said: “You would blind yourself, too, and condemn us all to slow death. Have you any idea what it means to be deprived of the spice liquor once you're addicted?”
   “The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever,” Paul said. “The Guild is crippled. Humans become little isolated clusters on their isolated planets. You know, I might do this thing out of pure spite . . . or out of ennui.”
   “Let us talk this over privately,” the taller Guildsman said. “I'm sure we can come to some compromise that is –”
   “Send the message to your people over Arrakis,” Paul said. “I grow tired of this argument. If that fleet over us doesn't leave soon there'll be no need for us to talk.” He nodded toward his communications men at the side of the hall. “You may use our equipment.”
   “First we must discuss this,” the tall Guildsman said. “We cannot just –”
   “Do it!” Paul barked. “The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it. You've agreed I have that power. We are not here to discuss or to negotiate or to compromise. You will obey my orders or suffer the immediate consequences!”
   “He means it,” the shorter Guildsman said. And Paul saw the fear grip them.
   Slowly the two crossed to the Fremen communications equipment.
   “Will they obey?” Gurney asked.
   “They have a narrow vision of time,” Paul said. “They can see ahead to a blank wall marking the consequences of disobedience. Every Guild navigator on every ship over us can look ahead to that same wall. They'll obey.”
   Paul turned back to look at the Emperor, said: “When they permitted you to mount your father's throne, it was only on the assurance that you'd keep the spice flowing. You've failed them, Majesty. Do you know the consequences?”
   “Nobody permitted me to –”
   “Stop playing the fool,” Paul barked. “The Guild is like a village beside a river. They need the water, but can only dip out what they require. They cannot dam the river and control it, because that focuses attention on what they take, it brings down eventual destruction. The spice flow, that's their river, and I have built a dam. But my dam is such that you cannot destroy it without destroying the river.”
   The Emperor brushed a hand through his red hair, glanced at the backs of the two Guildsmen.
   “Even your Bene Gesserit Truthsayer is trembling,” Paul said. “There are other poisons the Reverend Mothers can use for their tricks, but once they've used the spice liquor, the others no longer work.”
   The old woman pulled her shapeless black robes around her, pressed forward out of the crowd to stand at the barrier lances.
   “Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam,” Paul said. “It has been a long time since Caladan, hasn't it?”
   She looked past him at his mother, said: “Well, Jessica, I see that your son is indeed the one. For that you can be forgiven even the abomination of your daughter.”
   Paul stilled a cold, piercing anger, said: “You've never had the right or cause to forgive my mother anything!”
   The old woman locked eyes with him.
   “Try your tricks on me, old witch,” Paul said. “Where's your gom jabbar? Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there staring out at you!”
   The old woman dropped her gaze.
   “Have you nothing to say?” Paul demanded.
   “I welcomed you to the ranks of humans,” she muttered. “Don't besmirch that.”
   Paul raised his voice: “Observe her, comrades! This is a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother, patient in a patient cause. She could wait with her sisters – ninety generations for the proper combination of genes and environment to produce the one person their schemes required. Observe her! She knows now that the ninety generations have produced that person. Here I stand . . . but . . . I . . . will . . . never . . . do . . . her . . . bidding!”
   “Jessica!” the old woman screamed. “Silence him!”
   “Silence him yourself,” Jessica said.
   Paul glared at the old woman. “For your part in all this I could gladly have you strangled,” he said. “You couldn't prevent it!” he snapped as she stiffened in rage. “But I think it better punishment that you live out your years never able to touch me or bend me to a single thing your scheming desires.”
   “Jessica, what have you done?” the old woman demanded.
   “I'll give you only one thing,” Paul said. “You saw part of what the race needs, but how poorly you saw it. You think to control human breeding and intermix a select few according to your master plan! How little you understand of what –”
   “You mustn't speak of these things!” the old woman hissed.
   “Silence!” Paul roared. The word seemed to take substance as it twisted through the air between them under Paul's control.
   The old woman reeled back into the arms of those behind her, face blank with shock at the power with which he had seized her psyche. "Jessica, "she whispered. "Jessica."
   “I remember your gom jabbar,” Paul said. “You remember mine. I can kill you with a word.”
   The Fremen around the ball glanced knowingly at each other. Did the legend not say: “And his word shall carry death eternal to those who stand against righteousness.”
   Paul turned his attention to the tall Princess Royal standing beside her Emperor father. Keeping his eyes focused on her, he said: “Majesty, we both know the way out of our difficulty.”
   The Emperor glanced at his daughter, back to Paul. “You dare? You! An adventurer without family, a nobody from –”
   “You've already admitted who I am,” Paul said. “Royal kinsman, you said. Let's stop this nonsense.”
   “I am your ruler,” the Emperor said.
   Paul glanced at the Guildsmen standing now at the communications equipment and facing him. One of them nodded.
   “I could force it,” Paul said.
   “You will not dare!” the Emperor grated.
   Paul merely stared at him.
   The Princess Royal put a hand on her father's arm. “Father,” she said, and her voice was silky soft, soothing.
   “Don't try your tricks on me,” the Emperor said. He looked at her. “You don't need to do this, Daughter. We've other resources that –”
   “But here's a man fit to be your son,” she said.
   The old Reverend Mother, her composure regained, forced her way to the Emperor's side, leaned close to his ear and whispered.
   “She pleads your case,” Jessica said.
   Paul continued to look at the golden-haired Princess. Aside to his mother, he said: “That's Irulan, the oldest, isn't it?”
   “Yes.”
   Chani moved up on Paul's other side, said: “Do you wish me to leave, Muad'Dib?”
   He glanced at her. “Leave? You'll never again leave my side.”
   “There's nothing binding between us,” Chani said.
   Paul looked down at her for a silent moment, then: “Speak only truth with me, my Sihaya.” As she started to reply, he silenced her with a finger to her lips. “That which binds us cannot be loosed,” he said. “Now, watch these matters closely for I wish to see this room later through your wisdom.”
   The Emperor and his Truthsayer were carrying on a heated, low-voiced argument.
   Paul spoke to his mother: “She reminds him that it's part of their agreement to place a Bene Gesserit on the throne, and Irulan is the one they've groomed for it.”
   “Was that their plan?” Jessica said.
   “Isn't it obvious?” Paul asked.
   “I see the signs!” Jessica snapped. “My question was meant to remind you that you should not try to teach me those matters in which I instructed you.”
   Paul glanced at her, caught a cold smile on her lips.
   Gurney Halleck leaned between them, said: “I remind you, m'Lord, that there's a Harkonnen in that bunch.” He nodded toward the dark-haired Feyd-Rautha pressed against a barrier lance on the left. “The one with the squinting eyes there on the left. As evil a face as I ever say. You promised me once that –”
   “Thank you, Gurney,” Paul said.
   “It's the na-Baron . . . Baron now that the old man's dead,” Gurney said. “He'll do for what I've in –”
   “Can you take him, Gurney?” “M'Lord jests!”
   “That argument between the Emperor and his witch has gone on long enough, don't you think, Mother?”
   She nodded. “Indeed.”
   Paul raised his voice, called out to the Emperor: “Majesty, is there a Harkonnen among you?”
   Royal disdain revealed itself in the way the Emperor turned to look at Paul. “I believe my entourage has been placed under the protection of your ducal word,” he said.
   “My question was for information only,” Paul said. “I wish to know if a Harkonnen is officially a part of your entourage or if a Harkonnen is merely hiding behind a technicality out of cowardice.”
   The Emperor's smile was calculating. “Anyone accepted into the Imperial company is a member of my entourage.”
   “You have the word of a Duke,” Paul said, “but Muad'Dib is another matter. He may not recognize your definition of what constitutes an entourage. My friend Gurney Halleck wishes to kill a Harkonnen. If he –”
   “Kanly!” Feyd-Rautha shouted. He pressed against the barrier lance. “Your father named this vendetta, Atreides. You call me coward while you hide among your women and offer to send a lackey against me!”
   The old Truthsayer whispered something fiercely into the Emperor's ear, but he pushed her aside, said: “Kanly, is it? There are strict rules for kanly.”
   “Paul, put a stop to this,” Jessica said.
   “M'Lord,” Gurney said, “You promised me my day against the Harkonnens.”
   “You've had your day against them,” Paul said and he felt a harlequin abandon take over his emotions. He slipped his robe and hood from his shoulders, handed them to his mother with his belt and crysknife, began unstrapping his stillsuit. He sensed now that the universe focused on this moment.
   “There's no need for this,” Jessica said. “There are easier ways, Paul.”
   Paul stepped out of his stillsuit, slipped the crysknife from its sheath in his mother's hand. “I know,” he said. “Poison, an assassin, all the old familiar ways.”
   “You promised me a Harkonnen!” Gurney hissed, and Paul marked the rage in the man's face, the way the inkvine scar stood out dark and ridged. “You owe it to me, m'Lord!”
   “Have you suffered more from them than I?” Paul asked.
   “My sister,” Gurney rasped. “My years in the slave pits –”
   “My father,” Paul said. “My good friends and companions, Thufir Hawat and Duncan Idaho, my years as a fugitive without rank or succor . . . and one more thing: it is now kanly and you know as well as I the rules that must prevail.”
   Halleck's shoulders sagged. “M'Lord, if that swine . . . he's no more than a beast you'd spurn with your foot and discard the shoe because it'd been contaminated. Call in an executioner, if you must, or let me do it, but don't offer yourself to –”
   “Muad'Dib need not do this thing,” Chani said.
   He glanced at her, saw the fear for him in her eyes. “But the Duke Paul must,” he said.
   “This is a Harkonnen animal!” Gurney rasped.
   Paul hesitated on the point of revealing his own Harkonnen ancestry, stopped at a sharp look from his mother, said merely: “But this being has human shape, Gurney, and deserves human doubt.”
   Gurney said: “If he so much as –”
   “Please stand aside,” Paul said. He hefted the crysknife, pushed Gurney gently aside.
   “Gurney!” Jessica said. She touched Gurney's arm. “He's like his grandfather in this mood. Don't distract him. It's the only thing you can do for him now.” And she thought: Great Mother! What irony.
   The Emperor was studying Feyd-Rautha, seeing the heavy shoulders, the thick muscles. He turned to look at Paul – a stringy whipcord of a youth, not as desiccated as the Arrakeen natives, but with ribs there to count, and sunken in the flanks so that the ripple and gather of muscles could be followed under the skin.
   Jessica leaned close to Paul, pitched her voice for his ears alone: “One thing, Son. Sometimes a dangerous person is prepared by the Bene Gesserit, a word implanted into the deepest recesses by the old pleasure-pain methods. The word-sound most frequently used is Uroshnor. If this one's been prepared, as I strongly suspect, that word uttered in his ear will render his muscles flaccid and –”
   “I want no special advantage for this one,” Paul said. “Step back out of my way.”
   Gurney spoke to her: “Why is he doing this? Does he think to get himself killed and achieve martyrdom? This Fremen religious prattle, is that what clouds his reason?”
   Jessica hid her face in her hands, realizing that she did not know fully why Paul took this course. She could feel death in the room and knew that the changed Paul was capable of such a thing as Gurney suggested. Every talent within her focused on the need to protect her son, but there was nothing she could do.
   “Is it this religious prattle?” Gurney insisted.
   “Be silent,” Jessica whispered. “And pray.”
   The Emperor's face was touched by an abrupt smile. “If Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen . . . of my entourage . . . so wishes,” he said, “I relieve him of all restraint and give him freedom to choose his own course in this.” The Emperor waved a hand toward Paul's Fedaykin guards. “One of your rabble has my belt and short blade. If Feyd-Rautha wishes it, he may meet you with my blade in his hand.”
   “I wish it,” Feyd-Rautha said, and Paul saw the elation on the man's face.
   He's overconfident, Paul thought. There's a natural advantage I can accept.
   “Get the Emperor's blade,” Paul said, and watched as his command was obeyed. “Put it on the floor there.” He indicated a place with his foot. “Clear the Imperial rabble back against the wall and let the Harkonnen stand clear.”
   A flurry of robes, scraping of feet, low-voiced commands and protests accompanied obedience to Paul's command. The Guildsmen remained standing near the communications equipment. They frowned at Paul in obvious indecision.
   They're accustomed to seeing the future, Paul thought. In this place and time they're blind . . . even as I am. And he sampled the time-winds, sensing the turmoil, the storm nexus that now focused on this moment place. Even the faint gaps were closed now. Here was the unborn jihad, he knew. Here was the race consciousness that he had known once as his own terrible purpose. Here was reason enough for a Kwisatz Haderach or a Lisan al-Gaib or even the halting schemes of the Bene Gesserit. The race of humans had felt its own dormancy, sensed itself grown stale and knew now only the need to experience turmoil in which the genes would mingle and the strong new mixtures survive. All humans were alive as an unconscious single organism in this moment, experiencing a kind of sexual heat that could override any barrier.
   And Paul saw how futile were any efforts of his to change any smallest bit of this. He had thought to oppose the jihad within himself, but the jihad would be. His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him. They needed only the legend he already had become. He had shown them the way, given them mastery even over the Guild which must have the spice to exist.
   A sense of failure pervaded him, and he saw through it that Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen had slipped out of the torn uniform, stripped down to a fighting girdle with a mail core.
   This is the climax, Paul thought. From here, the future will open, the clouds part onto a kind of glory. And if I die here, they'll say I sacrificed myself that my spirit might lead them. And if I live, they'll say nothing can oppose Muad'Dib.
   “Is the Atreides ready?” Feyd-Rautha called, using the words of the ancient kanly ritual.
   Paul chose to answer him in the Fremen way: “May thy knife chip and shatter!” He pointed to the Emperor's blade on the floor, indicating that Feyd-Rautha should advance and take it.
   Keeping his attention on Paul, Feyd-Rautha picked up the knife, balancing it a moment in his hand to get the feel of it. Excitement kindled in him. This was a fight he had dreamed about – man against man, skill against skill with no shields intervening. He could see a way to power opening before him because the Emperor surely would reward whoever killed this troublesome duke. The reward might even be that haughty daughter and a share of the throne. And this yokel duke, this back-world adventurer could not possibly be a match for a Harkonnen trained in every device and every treachery by a thousand arena combats. And the yokel had no way of knowing he faced more weapons than a knife here.
   Let us see if you're proof against poison! Feyd-Rautha thought. He saluted Paul with the Emperor's blade, said: “Meet your death, fool.”
   “Shall we fight, cousin?” Paul asked. And he cat-footed forward, eyes on the waiting blade, his body crouched low with his own milk-white crysknife pointing out as though an extension of his arm.
   They circled each other, bare feet grating on the floor, watching with eyes intent for the slightest opening.
   “How beautifully you dance,” Feyd-Rautha said.
   He's a talker, Paul thought. There's another weakness. He grows uneasy in the face of silence.
   “Have you been shriven?” Feyd-Rautha asked.
   Still, Paul circled in silence.
   And the old Reverend Mother, watching the fight from the press of the Emperor's suite, felt herself trembling. The Atreides youth had called the Harkonnen cousin. It could only mean he knew the ancestry they shared, easy to understand because he was the Kwisatz Haderach. But the words forced her to focus on the only thing that mattered to her here.
   This could be a major catastrophe for the Bene Gesserit breeding scheme.
   She had seen something of what Paul had seen here, that Feyd-Rautha might kill but not be victorious. Another thought, though, almost overwhelmed her. Two end products of this long and costly program faced each other in a fight to the death that might easily claim both of them. If both died here that would leave only Feyd-Rautha's bastard daughter, still a baby, an unknown, an unmeasured factor, and Alia, the abomination.
   “Perhaps you have only pagan rites here,” Feyd-Rautha said. “Would you like the Emperor's Truthsayer to prepare your spirit for its journey?”
   Paul smiled, circling to the right, alert, his black thoughts suppressed by the needs of the moment.
   Feyd-Rautha leaped, feinting with right hand, but with the knife shifted in a blur to his left hand.
   Paul dodged easily, noting the shield-conditioned hesitation in Feyd-Rautha's thrust. Still, it was not as great a shield conditioning as some Paul had seen, and he sensed that Feyd-Rautha had fought before against unshielded foes.
   “Does an Atreides run or stand and fight?” Feyd-Rautha asked.
   Paul resumed his silent circling. Idaho's words came back to him, the words of training from the long-ago practice floor on Caladan: “Use the first moments in study. You may miss many an opportunity for quick victory this way, but the moments of study are insurance of success. Take your time and be sure.”
   “Perhaps you think this dance prolongs your life a few moments,” Feyd-Rautha said. “Well and good.” He stopped the circling, straightened.
   Paul had seen enough for a first approximation. Feyd-Rautha led to the left side, presenting the right hip as though the mailed fighting girdle could protect his entire side. It was the action of a man trained to the shield and with a knife in both hands.
   Or . . . And Paul hesitated . . . the girdle was more than it seemed.
   The Harkonnen appeared too confident against a man who'd this day led the forces of victory against Sardaukar legions.
   Feyd-Rautha noted the hesitation, said: “Why prolong the inevitable? You but keep me from exercising my rights over this ball of dirt.”
   If it's a flip-dart, Paul thought, it's a cunning one. The girdle shows no signs of tampering.
   “Why don't you speak?” Feyd-Rautha demanded.
   Paul resumed his probing circle, allowing himself a cold smile at the tone of unease in Feyd-Rautha's voice, evidence that the pressure of silence was building.
   “You smile, eh?” Feyd-Rautha asked. And he leaped in mid-sentence.
   Expecting the slight hesitation, Paul almost failed to evade the downflash of blade, felt its tip scratch his left arm. He silenced the sudden pain there, his mind flooded with realization that the earlier hesitation had been a trick – an overfeint. Here was more of an opponent than he had expected. There would be tricks within tricks within tricks.
   “Your own Thufir Hawat taught me some of my skills,” Feyd-Rautha said. “He gave me first blood. Too bad the old fool didn't live to see it.”
   And Paul recalled that Idaho had once said, “Expect only what happens in the fight. That way you'll never be surprised.”
   Again the two circled each other, crouched, cautious.
   Paul saw the return of elation to his opponent, wondered at it. Did a scratch signify that much to the man? Unless there were poison on the blade! But how could there be? His own men had handled the weapon, snooped it before passing it. They were too well trained to miss an obvious thing like that.
   “That woman you were talking to over there,” Feyd-Rautha said. “The little one. Is she something special to you? A pet perhaps? Will she deserve my special attentions?”
   Paul remained silent, probing with his inner senses, examining the blood from the wound, finding a trace of soporific from the Emperor's blade. He realigned his own metabolism to match this threat and change the molecules of the soporific, but he felt a thrill of doubt. They'd been prepared with soporific on a blade. A soporific. Nothing to alert a poison snooper, but strong enough to slow the muscles it touched. His enemies had their own plans within plans, their own stacked treacheries.
   Again Feyd-Rautha leaped, stabbing.
   Paul, the smile frozen on his face, feinted with slowness as though inhibited by the drug and at the last instant dodged to meet the downflashing arm on the crysknife's point.
   Feyd-Rautha ducked sideways and was out and away, his blade shifted to his left hand, and the measure of him that only a slight paleness of jaw betrayed the acid pain where Paul had cut him.
   Let him know his own moment of doubt, Paul thought. Let him suspect poison.
   “Treachery!” Feyd-Rautha shouted. “He's poisoned me! I do feel poison in my arm!”
   Paul dropped his cloak of silence, said: “Only a little acid to counter the soporific on the Emperor's blade.”
   Feyd-Rautha matched Paul's cold smile, lifted blade in left hand for a mock salute. His eyes glared rage behind the knife.
   Paul shifted his crysknife to his left hand, matching his opponent. Again, they circled, probing.
   Feyd-Rautha began closing the space between them, edging in, knife held high, anger showing itself in squint of eye and set of jaw. He feinted right and under, and they were pressed against each other, knife hands gripped, straining.
   Paul, cautious of Feyd-Rautha's right hip where he suspected a poison flip-dart, forced the turn to the right. He almost failed to see the needlepoint flick out beneath the belt line. A shift and a giving in Feyd-Rautha's motion warned him. The tiny point missed Paul's flesh by the barest fraction.
   On the left hip!
   Treachery within treachery within treachery, Paul reminded himself. Using Bene Gesserit-trained muscles, he sagged to catch a reflex in Feyd-Rautha, but the necessity of avoiding the tiny point jutting from his opponent's hip threw Paul off just enough that he missed his footing and found himself thrown hard to the floor, Feyd-Rautha on top.
   “You see it there on my hip?” Feyd-Rautha whispered. “Your death, fool.” And he began twisting himself around, forcing the poisoned needle closer and closer. “It'll stop your muscles and my knife will finish you. There'll be never a trace left to detect!”
   Paul strained, hearing the silent screams in his mind, his cell-stamped ancestors demanding that he use the secret word to slow Feyd-Rautha, to save himself.
   “I will not say it!” Paul gasped.
   Feyd-Rautha gaped at him, caught in the merest fraction of hesitation. It was enough for Paul to find the weakness of balance in one of his opponent's leg muscles, and their positions were reversed. Feyd-Rautha lay partly underneath with right hip high, unable to turn because of the tiny needlepoint caught against the floor beneath him.
   Paul twisted his left hand free, aided by the lubrication of blood from his arm, thrust once hard up underneath Feyd-Rautha's jaw. The point slid home into the brain. Feyd-Rautha jerked and sagged back, still held partly on his side by the needle imbedded in the floor.
   Breathing deeply to restore his calm, Paul pushed himself away and got to his feet. He stood over the body, knife in hand, raised his eyes with deliberate slowness to look across the room at the Emperor.
   “Majesty,” Paul said, “your force is reduced by one more. Shall we now shed sham and pretense? Shall we now discuss what must be? Your daughter wed to me and the way opened for an Atreides to sit on the throne.”
   The Emperor turned, looked at Count Fenring. The Count met his stare – gray eyes against green. The thought lay there clearly between them, their association so long that understanding could be achieved with a glance.
   Kill this upstart for me, the Emperor was saying. The Atreides is young and resourceful, yes – but he is also tired from long effort and he'd be no match for you, anyway. Call him out now . . . you know the way of it. Kill him.
   Slowly, Fenring moved his head, a prolonged turning until he faced Paul.
   “Do it!” the Emperor hissed.
   The Count focused on Paul, seeing with eyes his Lady Margot had trained in the Bene Gesserit way, aware of the mystery and hidden grandeur about this Atreides youth.
   I could kill him, Fenring thought – and he knew this for a truth.
   Something in his own secretive depths stayed the Count then, and he glimpsed briefly, inadequately, the advantage he held over Paul – a way of hiding from the youth, a furtiveness of person and motives that no eye could penetrate.
   Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern – a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he'd ever experienced.
   Fenring, reading Paul's emotion, said, “Majesty, I must refuse.”
   Rage overcame Shaddam IV. He took two short steps through the entourage, cuffed Fenring viciously across the jaw.
   A dark flush spread up and over the Count's face. He looked directly at the Emperor, spoke with deliberate lack of emphasis: “We have been friends, Majesty. What I do now is out of friendship. I shall forget that you struck me.”
   Paul cleared his throat, said: “We were speaking of the throne, Majesty.”
   The Emperor whirled, glared at Paul. “I sit on the throne!” he barked.
   “You shall have a throne on Salusa Secundus,” Paul said.
   “I put down my arms and came here on your word of bond!” the Emperor shouted. “You dare threaten –”
   “Your person is safe in my presence,” Paul said. “An Atreides promised it. Muad'Dib, however, sentences you to your prison planet. But have no fear, Majesty. I will ease the harshness of the place with all the powers at my disposal. It shall become a garden world, full of gentle things.”
   As the hidden import of Paul's words grew in the Emperor's mind, he glared across the room at Paul. “Now we see true motives,” he sneered.
   “Indeed,” Paul said.
   “And what of Arrakis?” the Emperor asked. “Another garden world full of gentle things?”
   “The Fremen have the word of Muad'Dib,” Paul said. “There will be flowing water here open to the sky and green oases rich with good things. But we have the spice to think of, too. Thus, there will always be desert on Arrakis . . . and fierce winds, and trials to toughen a man. We Fremen have a saying: 'God created Arrakis to train the faithful.' One cannot go against the word of God.”
   The old Truthsayer, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, had her own view of the hidden meaning in Paul's words now. She glimpsed the jihad and said: “You cannot loose these people upon the universe!”
   “You will think back to the gentle ways of the Sardaukar!” Paul snapped.
   “You cannot,” she whispered.
   “You're a Truthsayer,” Paul said. “Review your words.” He glanced at the Princess Royal, back to the Emperor. “Best be done quickly, Majesty.”
   The Emperor turned a stricken look upon his daughter. She touched his arm, spoke soothingly: “For this I was trained, Father.”
   He took a deep breath.
   “You cannot stay this thing,” the old Truthsayer muttered.
   The Emperor straightened, standing stiffly with a look of remembered dignity. “Who will negotiate for you, kinsman?” he asked.
   Paul turned, saw his mother, her eyes heavy-lidded, standing with Chani in a squad of Fedaykin guards. He crossed to them, stood looking down at Chani.
   “I know the reasons,” Chani whispered. “If it must be . . . Usul.”
   Paul, hearing the secret tears in her voice, touched her cheek. “My Sihaya need fear nothing, ever,” he whispered. He dropped his arm, faced his mother. “You will negotiate for me. Mother, with Chani by your side. She has wisdom and sharp eyes. And it is wisely said that no one bargains tougher than a Fremen. She will be looking through the eyes of her love for me and with the thought of her sons to be, what they will need. Listen to her.”
   Jessica sensed the harsh calculation in her son, put down a shudder. “What are your instructions?” she asked.
   “The Emperor's entire CHOAM Company holdings as dowry,” he said.
   “Entire?” She was shocked almost speechless.
   “He is to be stripped. I'll want an earldom and CHOAM directorship for Gurney Halleck, and him in the fief of Caladan. There will be titles and attendant power for every surviving Atreides man, not excepting the lowliest trooper.”
   “What of the Fremen?” Jessica asked.
   “The Fremen are mine,” Paul said. “What they receive shall be dispensed by Muad'Dib. It'll begin with Stilgar as Governor on Arrakis, but that can wait.”
   “And for me?” Jessica asked.
   “Is there something you wish?”
   “Perhaps Caladan,” she said, looking at Gurney. “I'm not certain. I've become too much the Fremen . . . and the Reverend Mother. I need a time of peace and stillness in which to think.”
   “That you shall have,” Paul said, “and anything else that Gurney or I can give you.”
   Jessica nodded, feeling suddenly old and tired. She looked at Chani. “And for the royal concubine?”
   “No title for me,” Chani whispered. “Nothing. I beg of you.”
   Paul stared down into her eyes, remembering her suddenly as she had stood once with little Leto in her arms, their child now dead in this violence. “I swear to you now,” he whispered, “that you'll need no title. That woman over there will be my wife and you but a concubine because this is a political thing and we must weld peace out of this moment, enlist the Great Houses of the Landsraad. We must obey the forms. Yet that princess shall have no more of me than my name. No child of mine nor touch nor softness of glance, nor instant of desire.”
   “So you say now,” Chani said. She glanced across the room at the tail princess.
   “Do you know so little of my son?” Jessica whispered. “See that princess standing there, so haughty and confident. They say she has pretensions of a literary nature. Let us hope she finds solace in such things; she'll have little else.” A bitter laugh escaped Jessica. “Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine – never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine – history will call us wives.”

Appendix I: The Ecology of Dune

   Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
   –Pardot Kynes, First Planetologist of Arrakis

   The effect of Arrakis on the mind of the newcomer usually is that of overpowering barren land. The stranger might think nothing could live or grow in the open here, that this was the true wasteland that had never been fertile and never would be.
   To Pardot Kynes, the planet was merely an expression of energy, a machine being driven by its sun. What it needed was reshaping to fit it to man's needs. His mind went directly to the free-moving human population, the Fremen. What a challenge! What a tool they could be! Fremen: an ecological and geological force of almost unlimited potential.
   A direct and simple man in many ways, Pardot Kynes. One must evade Harkonnen restrictions? Excellent. Then one marries a Fremen woman. When she gives you a Fremen son, you begin with him, with Liet-Kynes, and the other children, teaching them ecological literacy, creating a new language with symbols that arm the mind to manipulate an entire landscape, its climate, seasonal limits, and finally to break through all ideas of force into the dazzling awareness of order.
   “There's an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet,” Kynes said. “You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple; to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system's capacity to sustain life. Life – all life – is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.”
   This was Pardot Kynes lecturing to a sietch warren class.
   Before the lectures, though, he had to convince the Fremen. To understand how this came about, you must first understand the enormous single-mindedness, the innocence with which he approached any problem. He was not naive, he merely permitted himself no distractions.
   He was exploring the Arrakis landscape in a one-man groundcar one hot afternoon when he stumbled onto a deplorably common scene. Six Harkonnen bravos, shielded and fully armed, had trapped three Fremen youths in the open behind the Shield Wall near the village of Windsack. To Kynes, it was a ding-dong battle, more slapstick then real, until he focused on the fact that the Harkonnens intended to kill the Fremen. By this time, one of the youths was down with a severed artery, two of the bravos were down as well, but it was still four armed men against two striplings.
   Kynes wasn't brave; he merely had that single-mindedness and caution. The Harkonnens were killing Fremen. They were destroying the tools with which he intended to remake a planet! He triggered his own shield, waded in and had two of the Harkonnens dead with a slip-tip before they knew anyone was behind them. He dodged a sword thrust from one of the others, slit the man's throat with a neat entrisseur, and left the lone remaining bravo to the two Fremen youths, turning his full attention to saving the lad on the ground. And save the lad he did . . . while the sixth Harkonnen was being dispatched.
   Now here was a pretty kettle of sandtrout! The Fremen didn't know what to make of Kynes. They knew who he was, of course. No man arrived on Arrakis without a full dossier finding its way into the Fremen strongholds. They knew him: he was an Imperial servant.
   But he killed Harkonnens!
   Adults might have shrugged and, with some regret, sent his shade to join those of the six dead men on the ground. But these Fremen were inexperienced youths and all they could see was that they owed this Imperial servant a mortal obligation.
   Kynes wound up two days later in a sietch that looked down on Wind Pass. To him, it was all very natural. He talked to the Fremen about water, about dunes anchored by grass, about palmaries filled with date palms, about open qanats flowing across the desert. He talked and talked and talked.
   All around him raged a debate that Kynes never saw. What to do with this madman? He knew the location of a major sietch. What to do? What of his words, this mad talk about a paradise on Arrakis? Just talk. He knows too much. But he killed Harkonnens! What of the water burden? When did we owe the Imperium anything? He killed Harkonnens. Anyone can kill Harkonnens. I have done it myself.
   But what of this talk about the flowering of Arrakis?
   Very simple: Where is the water for this?
   He says it is here! And he did save three of ours.
   He saved three fools who had put themselves in the way of the Harkonnen fist! And he has seen crysknives!
   The necessary decision was known for hours before it was voiced. The tau of a sietch tells its members what they must do; even the most brutal necessity is known. An experienced fighter was sent with a consecrated knife to do the job. Two watermen followed him to get the water from the body. Brutal necessity.
   It's doubtful that Kynes even focused on his would-be executioner. He was talking to a group that spread around him at a cautious distance. He walked as he talked: a short circle, gesturing. Open water, Kynes said. Walk in the open without stillsuits. Water for dipping it out of a pond! Portyguls!
   The knifeman confronted him.
   “Remove yourself,” Kynes said, and went on talking about secret windtraps. He brushed past the man. Kynes' back stood open for the ceremonial blow.
   What went on in that would-be executioner's mind cannot be known now. Did he finally listen to Kynes and believe? Who knows? But what he did is a matter of record. Uliet was his name, Older Liet. Uliet walked three paces and deliberately fell on his own knife, thus “removing” himself. Suicide? Some say Shai-hulud moved him.
   Talk about omens!
   From that instant, Kynes had but to point, saying “Go there.” Entire Fremen tribes went. Men died, women died, children died. But they went.
   Kynes returned to his Imperial chores, directing the Biological Testing Stations. And now, Fremen began to appear among the Station personnel. The Fremen looked at each other. They were infiltrating the “system,” a possibility they'd never considered. Station tools began finding their way into the sietch warrens – especially cutterays which were used to dig underground catchbasins and hidden windtraps.
   Water began collecting in the basins.
   It became apparent to the Fremen that Kynes was not a madman totally, just mad enough to be holy. He was one of the umma, the brotherhood of prophets. The shade of Uliet was advanced to the sadus, the throne of heavenly judges.
   Kynes – direct, savagely intent Kynes – knew that highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new. He set up small-unit experiments with regular interchange of data for a swift Tansley effect, let each group find its own path. They must accumulate millions of tiny facts. He organized only isolated and rough run-through tests to put their difficulties into perspective.
   Core samplings were made throughout the bled. Charts were developed on the long drifts of weather that are called climate. He found that in the wide belt contained by the 70-degree lines, north and south, temperatures for thousands of years hadn't gone outside the 254-332 degrees (absolute) range, and that this belt had long growing seasons where temperatures ranged, from 284 to 302 degrees absolute: the “bonanza” range for terraform life . . . once they solved the water problem.
   When will we solve it? the Fremen asked. When will we see Arrakis as a paradise?
   In the manner of a teacher answering a child who has asked the sum of 2 plus 2, Kynes told them: “From three hundred to five hundred years.”
   A lesser folk might have howled in dismay. But the Fremen had learned patience from men with whips. It was a bit longer than they had anticipated, but they all could see that the blessed day was coming. They tightened their sashes and went back to work. Somehow, the disappointment made the prospect of paradise more real.
   The concern on Arrakis was not with water, but with moisture. Pets were almost unknown, stock animals rare. Some smugglers employed the domesticated desert ass, the kulon, but the water price was high even when the beasts were fitted with modified stillsuits.
   Kynes thought of installing reduction plants to recover water from the hydrogen and oxygen locked in native rock, but the energy-cost factor was far too high. The polar caps (disregarding the false sense of water security they gave the pyons) held far too small an amount for his project . . . and he already suspected where the water had to be. There was that consistent increase of moisture at median altitudes, and in certain winds. There was that primary clue in the air balance – 23 per cent oxygen, 75.4 per cent nitrogen and .023 per cent carbon dioxide – with the trace gases taking up the rest.
   There was a rare native root plant that grew above the 2,500 meter level in the northern temperate zone. A tuber two meters long yielded half a liter of water. And there were the terraform desert plants: the tougher ones showed signs of thriving if planted in depressions lined with dew precipitators.
   Then Kynes saw the salt pan.
   His 'thopter, flying between stations far out on the bled, was blown off course by a storm. When the storm passed, there was the pan – a giant oval depression some three hundred kilometers on the long axis – a glaring white surprise in the open desert. Kynes landed, tasted the pan's storm-cleaned surface.
   Salt.
   Now, he was certain.
   There'd been open water on Arrakis – once. He began reexamining the evidence of the dry wells where trickles of water had appeared and vanished, never to return.
   Kynes set his newly trained Fremen limnologists to work: their chief clue, leathery scraps of matter sometimes found with the spice-mass after a blow. This had been ascribed to a fictional «sandtrout» in Fremen folk stories. As facts grew into evidence, a creature emerged to explain these leathery scraps – a sandswimmer that blocked off water into fertile pockets within the porous lower strata below the 280° (absolute) line.
   This “water-stealer” died by the millions in each spice-blow. A five-degree change in temperature could kill it. The few survivors entered a semidormant cyst-hibernation to emerge in six years as small (about three meters long) sandworms. Of these, only a few avoided their larger brothers and pre-spice water pockets to emerge into maturity as the giant shai-hulud. (Water is poisonous to shai-hulud as the Fremen had long known from drowning the rare “stunted worm” of the Minor Erg to produce the awareness-spectrum narcotic they call Water of Life. The “stunted worm” is a primitive form of shai-hulud that reaches a length of only about nine meters.)
   Now they had the circular relationship: little maker to pre-spice mass; little maker to shai-hulud; shai-hulud to scatter the spice upon which fed microscopic creatures called sand plankton; the sand plankton, food for shai-hulud, growing, burrowing, becoming little makers.
   Kynes and his people turned their attention from these great relationships and focused now on micro-ecology. First, the climate: the sand surface often reached temperatures of 344° to 350° (absolute). A foot below ground it might be 55° cooler; a foot above ground, 25° cooler. Leaves or black shade could provide another 18° of cooling. Next, the nutrients: sand of Arrakis is mostly a product of worm digestion; dust (the truly omnipresent problem there) is produced by the constant surface creep, the «saltation» movement of sand. Coarse grains are found on the downwind sides of dunes. The windward side is packed smooth and hard. Old dunes are yellow (oxidized), young dunes are the color of the parent rock – usually gray.
   Downwind sides of old dunes provided the first plantation areas. The Fremen aimed first for a cycle of poverty grass with peatlike hair cilia to intertwine, mat and fix the dunes by depriving the wind of its big weapon: movable grains.
   Adaptive zones were laid out in the deep south far from Harkonnen watchers. The mutated poverty grasses were planted first along the downwind (slipface) of the chosen dunes that stood across the path of the prevailing westerlies. With the downwind face anchored, the windward face grew higher and higher and the grass was moved to keep pace. Giant sifs (long dunes with sinuous crest) of more than 1,500 meters height were produced this way.
   When barrier dunes reached sufficient height, the windward faces were planted with tougher sword grasses. Each structure on a base about six times as thick as its height was anchored – “fixed.”
   Now, they came in with deeper plantings – ephemerals (chenopods, pigweeds, and amaranth to begin), then scotch broom, low lupine, vine eucalyptus (the type adapted for Caladan's northern reaches), dwarf tamarisk, shore pine – then the true desert growths: candelilla, saguaro, and bis-naga, the barrel cactus. Where it would grow, they introduced camel sage, onion grass, gobi feather grass, wild alfalfa, burrow bush, sand verbena, evening primrose, incense bush, smoke tree, creosote bush.
   They turned then to the necessary animal life – burrowing creatures to open the soil and aerate it: kit fox, kangaroo mouse, desert hare, sand terrapin . . . and the predators to keep them in check: desert hawk, dwarf owl, eagle and desert owl; and insects to fill the niches these couldn't reach: scorpion, centipede, trapdoor spider, the biting wasp and the wormfly . . . and the desert bat to keep watch on these.
   Now came the crucial test: date palms, cotton, melons, coffee, medicinals – more than 200 selected food plant types to test and adapt.
   “The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem,” Kynes said, “is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.”
   Had they achieved a system?
   Kynes and his people watched and waited. The Fremen now knew what he meant by an open-end prediction to five hundred years.
   A report came up from the palmaries:
   At the desert edge of the plantings, the sand plankton is being poisoned through interaction with the new forms of life. The reason: protein incompatibility. Poisonous water was forming there which the Arrakis life would not touch. A barren zone surrounded the plantings and even shai-hulud would not invade it.
   Kynes went down to the palmaries himself – a twenty-thumper trip (in a palanquin like a wounded man or Reverend Mother because he never became a sandrider). He tested the barren zone (it stank to heaven) and came up with a bonus, a gift from Arrakis.
   The addition of sulfur and fixed nitrogen converted the barren zone to a rich plant bed for terraform life. The plantings could be advanced at will!
   “Does this change the timing?” the Fremen asked.
   Kynes went back to his planetary formulae. Windtrap figures were fairly secure by then. He was generous with his allowances, knowing he couldn't draw neat lines around ecological problems. A certain amount of plant cover had to be set aside to hold dunes in place; a certain amount for foodstuffs (both human and animal); a certain amount to lock moisture in root systems and to feed water out into surrounding parched areas. They'd mapped the roving cold spots on the open bled by this time. These had to be figured into the formulae. Even shai-hulud had a place in the charts. He must never be destroyed, else spice wealth would end. But his inner digestive “factory,” with its enormous concentrations of aldehydes and acids, was a giant source of oxygen. A medium worm (about 200 meters long) discharged into the atmosphere as much oxygen as ten square kilometers of green growing photosynthesis surface.
   He had the Guild to consider. The spice bribe to the Guild for preventing weather satellites and other watchers in the skies of Arrakis already had reached major proportions.
   Nor could the Fremen be ignored. Especially the Fremen, with their windtraps and irregular landholdings organized around water supply; the Fremen with their new ecological literacy and their dream of cycling vast areas of Arrakis through a prairie phase into forest cover.
   From the charts emerged a figure. Kynes reported it. Three per cent. If they could get three per cent of the green plant element on Arrakis involved in forming carbon compounds, they'd have their self-sustaining cycle.
   “But how long?” the Fremen demanded.
   “Oh, that: about three hundred and fifty years.”
   So it was true as this umma had said in the beginning: the thing would not come in the lifetime of any man now living, nor in the lifetime of their grandchildren eight times removed, but it would come.
   The work continued: building, planting, digging, training the children.
   Then Kynes-the-Umma was killed in the cave-in at Plaster Basin.
   By this time his son, Liet-Kynes, was nineteen, a full Fremen and sandrider who had killed more than a hundred Harkonnens. The Imperial appointment for which the elder Kynes already had applied in the name of his son was delivered as a matter of course. The rigid class structure of the faufreluches had its well-ordered purpose here. The son had been trained to follow the father.
   The course had been set by this time, the Ecological-Fremen were aimed along their way. Liet-Kynes had only to watch and nudge and spy upon the Harkonnens . . . until the day his planet was afflicted by a Hero.

Appendix II: The Religion of Dune

   Before the coming of Muad'Dib, the Fremen of Arrakis practiced a religion whose roots in the Maometh Saari are there for any scholar to see. Many have traced the extensive borrowings from other religions. The most common example is the Hymn to Water, a direct copy from the Orange Catholic Liturgical Manual, calling for rain clouds which Arrakis had never seen. But there are more profound points of accord between the Kitab al-Ibar of the Fremen and the teachings of Bible, Ilm, and Fiqh.
   Any comparison of the religious beliefs dominant in the Imperium up to the time of Muad'Dib must start with the major forces which shaped those beliefs:
   1. The followers of the Fourteen Sages, whose Book was the Orange Catholic Bible, and whose views are expressed in the Commentaries and other literature produced by the Commission of Ecumenical Translators. (C.E.T.);
   2. The Bene Gesserit, who privately denied they were a religious order, but who operated behind an almost impenetrable screen of ritual mysticism, and whose training, whose symbolism, organization, and internal teaching methods were almost wholly religious;
   3. The agnostic ruling class (including the Guild) for whom religion was a kind of puppet show to amuse the populace and keep it docile, and who believed essentially that all phenomena – even religious phenomena – could be reduced to mechanical explanations;
   4. The so-called Ancient Teachings – including those preserved by the Zensunni Wanderers from the first, second, and third Islamic movements; the Navachristianity of Chusuk, the Buddislamic Variants of the types dominant at Lankiveil and Sikun, the Blend Books of the Mahayana Lankavatara, the Zen Hekiganshu of III Delta Pavonis, the Tawrah and Talmudic Zabur surviving on Salusa Secundus, the pervasive Obeah Ritual, the Muadh Quran with its pure Ilm and Fiqh preserved among the pundi rice farmers of Caladan, the Hindu outcroppings found all through the universe in little pockets of insulated pyons, and finally, the Butlerian Jihad.
   There is a fifth force which shaped religious belief, but its effect is so universal and profound that it deserves to stand alone.
   This is, of course, space travel – and in any discussion of religion, it deserves to be written thus:

SPACE TRAVEL!

   Mankind's movement through deep space placed a unique stamp on religion during the one hundred and ten centuries that preceded the Butlerian Jihad. To begin with, early space travel, although widespread, was largely unregulated, slow, and uncertain, and, before the Guild monopoly, was accomplished by a hodgepodge of methods. The first space experiences, poorly communicated and subject to extreme distortion, were a wild inducement to mystical speculation.
   Immediately, space gave a different flavor and sense to ideas of Creation. That difference is seen even in the highest religious achievements of the period. All through religion, the feeling of the sacred was touched by anarchy from the outer dark.
   It was as though Jupiter in all his descendant forms retreated into the maternal darkness to be superseded by a female immanence filled with ambiguity and with a face of many terrors.
   The ancient formulae intertwined, tangled together as they were fitted to the needs of new conquests and new heraldic symbols. It was a time of struggle between beast-demons on the one side and the old prayers and invocations on the other.
   There was never a clear decision.
   During this period, it was said that Genesis was reinterpreted, permitting God to say:
   “Increase and multiply, and fill the universe, and subdue it, and rule over all manner of strange beasts and living creatures in the infinite airs, on the infinite earths and beneath them.”
   It was a time of sorceresses whose powers were real. The measure of them is seen in the fact they never boasted how they grasped the firebrand.
   Then came the Butlerian Jihad – two generations of chaos. The god of machine-logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised:
   “Man may not be replaced.”
   Those two generations of violence were a thalamic pause for all humankind. Men looked at their gods and their rituals and saw that both were filled with that most terrible of all equations: fear over ambition.
   Hesitantly, the leaders of religions whose followers had spilled the blood of billions began meeting to exchange views. It was a move encouraged by the Spacing Guild, which was beginning to build its monopoly over all interstellar travel, and by the Bene Gesserit who were banding the sorceresses.
   Out of those first ecumenical meetings came two major developments:
   1. The realization that all religions had at least one common commandment: “Thou shall not disfigure the soul.”
   2. The Commission of Ecumenical Translators.
   C.E.T. convened on a neutral island of Old Earth, spawning ground of the mother religions. They met “in the common belief that there exists a Divine Essence in the universe.” Every faith with more than a million followers was represented, and they reached a surprisingly immediate agreement on the statement of their common goal:
   “We are here to remove a primary weapon from the hands of disputant religions. That weapon – the claim to possession of the one and only revelation.”
   Jubilation at this “sign of profound accord” proved premature. For more than a standard year, that statement was the only announcement from C.E.T. Men spoke bitterly of the delay. Troubadours composed witty, biting songs about the one hundred and twenty-one “Old Cranks” as the C.E.T. delegates came to be called. (The name arose from a ribald joke which played on the C.E.T. initials and called the delegates “Cranks-Effing-Turners.”) One of the songs, “Brown Repose,” has undergone periodic revival and is popular even today:
 
   "Consider leis.
   Brown repose – and
   The tragedy
   In all of those
   Cranks! All those Cranks!
   So laze – so laze
   Through all your days.
   Time has toll'd for
   M'Lord Sandwich!"
 
   Occasional rumors leaked out of the C.E.T. sessions. It was said they were comparing texts and, irresponsibly, the texts were named. Such rumors inevitably provoked anti-ecumenism riots and, of course, inspired new witticisms.
   Two years passed . . . three years.
   The Commissioners, nine of their original number having died and been replaced, paused to observe formal installation of the replacements and announced they were laboring to produce one book, weeding out “all the pathological symptoms” of the religious past.
   “We are producing an instrument of Love to be played in all ways,” they said.
   Many consider it odd that this statement provoked the worst outbreaks of violence against ecumenism. Twenty delegates were recalled by their congregations. One committed suicide by stealing a space frigate and diving it into the sun.
   Historians estimate the riots took eighty million lives. That works out to about six thousand for each world then in the Landsraad League. Considering the unrest of the time, this may not be an excessive estimate, although any pretense to real accuracy in the figure must be just that – pretense. Communication between worlds was at one of its lowest ebbs.
   The troubadours, quite naturally, had a field day. A popular musical comedy of the period had one of the C.E.T. delegates sitting on a white sand beach beneath a palm tree singing:
 
   "For God, woman and the splendor of love
   We dally here sans fears or cares.
   Troubadour! Troubadour, sing another melody
   For God, Woman and the splendor of love!"
 
   Riots and comedy are but symptoms of the times, profoundly revealing. They betray the psychological tone, the deep uncertainties . . . and the striving for something better, plus the fear that nothing would come of it all.
   The major dams against anarchy in these times were the embryo Guild, the Bene Gesserit and the Landsraad, which continued its 2,000-year record of meeting in spite of the severest obstacles. The Guild's part appears clear: they gave free transport for all Landsraad and C.E.T. business. The Bene Gesserit role is more obscure. Certainly, this is the time in which they consolidated their hold upon the sorceresses, explored the subtle narcotics, developed prana-bindu training and conceived the Missionaria Protectiva, that black arm of superstition. But it is also the period that saw the composing of the Litany against Fear and the assembly of the Azhar Book, that bibliographic marvel that preserves the great secrets of the most ancient faiths.
   Ingsley's comment is perhaps the only one possible:
   “Those were times of deep paradox.”
   For almost seven years, then, C.E.T. labored. And as their seventh anniversary approached, they prepared the human universe for a momentous announcement. On that seventh anniversary, they unveiled the Orange Catholic Bible.
   “Here is a work with dignity and meaning,” they said. “Here is a way to make humanity aware of itself as a total creation of God.”
   The men of C.E.T. were likened to archeologists of ideas, inspired by God in the grandeur of rediscovery. It was said they had brought to light “the vitality of great ideals overlaid by the deposits of centuries,” that they had “sharpened the moral imperatives that come out of a religious conscience.”
   With the O.C. Bible, C.E.T. presented the Liturgical Manual and the Commentaries – in many respects a more remarkable work, not only because of its brevity (less than half the size of the O.C. Bible), but also because of its candor and blend of self-pity and self-righteousness.
   The beginning is an obvious appeal to the agnostic rulers.
   “Men, finding no answers to the sunnan [the ten thousand religious questions from the Shari-ah] now apply their own reasoning. All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God's universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.”
   In their conclusion, though, the Commentaries set a harsh tone that very likely foretold their fate.
   “Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you've always known.”
   There was an odd sense of calm as the presses and shigawire imprinters rolled and the O.C. Bible spread out through the worlds. Some interpreted this as a sign from God, an omen of unity.
   But even the C.E.T. delegates betrayed the fiction of that calm as they returned to their respective congregations. Eighteen of them were lynched within two months. Fifty-three recanted within the year.
   The O.C. Bible was denounced as a work produced by “the hubris of reason.” It was said that its pages were filled with a seductive interest in logic. Revisions that catered to popular bigotry began appearing. These revisions leaned on accepted symbolisms (Cross, Crescent, Feather Rattle, the Twelve Saints, the thin Buddha, and the like) and it soon became apparent that the ancient superstitions and beliefs had not been absorbed by the new ecumenism.
   Halloway's label for C.E.T.'s seven-year effort – “Galactophasic Determinism” – was snapped up by eager billions who interpreted the initials G.D. as “God-Damned.”
   C.E.T. Chairman Toure Bomoko, an Ulema of the Zensunnis and one of the fourteen delegates who never recanted ("The Fourteen Sages" of popular history), appeared to admit finally the C.E.T. had erred.
   “We shouldn't have tried to create new symbols,” he said. “We should've realized we weren't supposed to introduce uncertainties into accepted belief, that we weren't supposed to stir up curiosity about God. We are daily confronted by the terrifying instability of all things human, yet we permit our religions to grow more rigid and controlled, more conforming and oppressive. What is this shadow across the highway of Divine Command? It is a warning that institutions endure, that symbols endure when their meaning is lost, that there is no summa of all attainable knowledge.”
   The bitter double edge in this “admission” did not escape Bomoko's critics and he was forced soon afterward to flee into exile, his life dependent upon the Guild's pledge of secrecy. He reportedly died on Tupile, honored and beloved, his last words: “Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.”
   It is pleasant to think that Bomoko understood the prophecy in his words: “Institutions endure.” Ninety generations later, the O.C. Bible and the Commentaries permeated the religious universe.
   When Paul-Muad'Dib stood with his right hand on the rock shrine enclosing his father's skull (the right hand of the blessed, not the left hand of the damned) he quoted word for word from “Bomoko's Legacy” –
   “You who have defeated us say to yourselves that Babylon is fallen and its works have been overturned. I say to you still that man remains on trial, each man in his own dock. Each man is a little war.”
   The Fremen said of Muad'Dib that he was like Abu Zide whose frigate defied the Guild and rode one day 'there' and back. 'There' used in this way translates directly from the Fremen mythology as the land of the ruh-spirit, the alam al-mithal where all limitations are removed.
   The parallel between this and the Kwisatz Haderach is readily seen. The Kwisatz Haderach that the Sisterhood sought through its breeding program was interpreted as “The shortening of the way” or “The one who can be two places simultaneously.”
   But both of these interpretations can be shown to stem directly from the Commentaries: “When law and religious duty are one, your selfdom encloses the universe.”
   Of himself, Muad'Dib said: “I am a net in the sea of time, free to sweep future and past. I am a moving membrane from whom no possibility can escape.”
   These thoughts are all one and the same and they harken to 22 Kalima in the O.C. Bible where it says: “Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and has powers of reality.”
   It is when we get into Muad'Dib's own commentaries in “The Pillars of the Universe” as interpreted by his holy men, the Qizara Tafwid, that we see his real debt to C.E.T. and Fremen-Zensunni.
 
   Muad'Dib: “Law and duty are one; so be it. But remember these limitations – Thus are you never fully self-conscious. Thus do you remain immersed in the communal tau. Thus are you always less than an individual.”
   O.C. Bible: Identical wording. (61 Revelations.)
   Muad'Dib: “Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.”
   C.E.T. Commentaries: Identical wording. (The Azhar Book traces this statement to the first century religious writer, Neshou; through a paraphrase.)
   Muad'Dib: "If a child, an untrained person, an ignorant person, or an insane person incites trouble, it is the fault of authority for not predicting and preventing that trouble. "
   O.C. Bible: “Any sin can be ascribed, at least in part, to a natural bad tendency that is an extenuating circumstance acceptable to God.” (The Azhar Book traces this to the ancient Semitic Tawra.)
   Muad'Dib: “Reach forth thy hand and eat what God has provided thee; and when thou are replenished, praise the Lord.”
   O.C. Bible: a paraphrase with identical meaning. (The Azhar Book traces this in slightly different form to First Islam.)
   Muad'Dib: “Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.”
   Fremen Kitab al-Ibar: “The weight of a kindly God is a fearful thing. Did not God give us the burning sun (Al-Lat)? Did not God give us the Mothers of Moisture (Reverend Mothers)? Did not God give us Shaitan (Iblis, Satan)? From Shaitan did we not get the hurtfulness of speed?”
   (This is the source of the Fremen saying: “Speed comes from Shaitan.” Consider: for every one hundred calories of heat generated by exercise [speed] the body evaporates about six ounces of perspiration. The Fremen word for perspiration is bakka or tears and, in one pronunciation, translates: “The life essence that Shaitan squeezes from your soul.”)
 
   Muad'Dib's arrival is called "religiously timely" by Koneywell, but timing had little to do with it. As Muad'Dib himself said: "I am here; so . . . "
   It is, however, vital to an understanding of Muad'Dib's religious impact that you never lose sight of one fact: the Fremen were a desert people whose entire ancestry was accustomed to hostile landscapes. Mysticism isn't difficult when you survive each second by surmounting open hostility. "You are there – so . . . "
   With such a tradition, suffering is accepted – perhaps as unconscious punishment, but accepted. And it's well to note that Fremen ritual gives almost complete freedom from guilt feelings. This isn't necessarily because their law and religion were identical, making disobedience a sin. It's likely closer to the mark to say they cleansed themselves of guilt easily because their everyday existence required brutal judgments (often deadly) which in a softer land would burden men with unbearable guilt.
   This is likely one of the roots of Fremen emphasis on superstition (disregarding the Missionaria Protectiva's ministrations). What matter that whistling sands are an omen? What matter that you must make the sign of the fist when first you see First Moon? A man's flesh is his own and his water belongs to the tribe – and the mystery of life isn't a problem to solve but a reality to experience. Omens help you remember this. And because you are here, because you have the religion, victory cannot evade you in the end.
   As the Bene Gesserit taught for centuries, long before they ran afoul of the Fremen:
   “When religion and politics ride the same cart, when that cart is driven by a living holy man (baraka), nothing can stand in their path.”

Appendix III: Report on Bene Gesserit Motives and Purposes

   Here follows an excerpt from the Summa prepared by her own agents at the request of the Lady Jessica immediately after the Arrakis Affair. The candor of this report amplifies its value far beyond the ordinary.

   Because the Bene Gesserit operated for centuries behind the blind of a semi-mystic school while carrying on their selective breeding program among humans, we tend to award them with more status than they appear to deserve. Analysis of their “trial of fact” on the Arrakis Affair betrays the school's profound ignorance of its own role.
   It may be argued that the Bene Gesserit could examine only such facts as were available to them and had no direct access to the person of the Prophet Muad'Dib. But the school had surmounted greater obstacles and its error here goes deeper.
   The Bene Gesserit program had as its target the breeding of a person they labeled “Kwisatz Haderach,” a term signifying “one who can be many places at once.” In simpler terms, what they sought was a human with mental powers permitting him to understand and use higher order dimensions.
   They were breeding for a super-Mentat, a human computer with some of the prescient abilities found in Guild navigators. Now, attend these facts carefully:
   Muad'Dib, born Paul Atreides, was the son of the Duke Leto, a man whose bloodline had been watched carefully for more than a thousand years. The Prophet's mother, Lady Jessica, was a natural daughter of the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and carried gene-markers whose supreme importance to the breeding program was known for almost two thousand years. She was a Bene Gesserit bred and trained, and should have been a willing tool of the project.
   The Lady Jessica was ordered to produce an Atreides daughter. The plan was to inbreed this daughter with Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a nephew of the Baron Vladimir, with the high probability of a Kwisatz Haderach from that union. Instead, for reasons she confesses have never been completely clear to her, the concubine Lady Jessica defied her orders and bore a son.
   This alone should have alerted the Bene Gesserit to the possibility that a wild variable had entered their scheme. But there were other far more important indications that they virtually ignored:
   1. As a youth, Paul Atreides showed ability to predict the future. He was known to have had prescient visions that were accurate, penetrating, and defied four-dimensional explanation.
   2. The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Bene Gesserit Proctor who tested Paul's humanity when he was fifteen, deposes that he surmounted more agony in the test than any other human of record. Yet she failed to make special note of this in her report!
   3. When Family Atreides moved to the planet Arrakis, the Fremen population there hailed the young Paul as a prophet, “the voice from the outer world.” The Bene Gesserit were well aware that the rigors of such a planet as Arrakis with its totality of desert landscape, its absolute lack of open water, its emphasis on the most primitive necessities for survival, inevitably produces a high proportion of sensitives. Yet this Fremen reaction and the obvious element of the Arrakeen diet high in spice were glossed over by Bene Gesserit observers.
   4. When the Harkonnens and the soldier-fanatics of the Padishah Emperor reoccupied Arrakis, killing Paul's father and most of the Atreides troops, Paul and his mother disappeared. But almost immediately there were reports of a new religious leader among the Fremen, a man called Muad'Dib, who again was hailed as “the voice from the outer world.” The reports stated clearly that he was accompanied by a new Reverend Mother of the Sayyadina Rite “who is the woman who bore him.” Records available to the Bene Gesserit stated in plain terms that the Fremen legends of the Prophet contained these words: “He shall be born of a Bene Gesserit witch.”
   (It may be argued here that the Bene Gesserit sent their Missionaria Protectiva onto Arrakis centuries earlier to implant something like this legend as safeguard should any members of the school be trapped there and require sanctuary, and that this legend of “the voice from the outer world” was properly to be ignored because it appeared to be the standard Bene Gesserit ruse. But this would be true only if you granted that the Bene Gesserit were correct in ignoring the other clues about Paul-Muad'Dib.)
   5. When the Arrakis Affair boiled up, the Spacing Guild made overtures to the Bene Gesserit. The Guild hinted that its navigators, who use the spice drug of Arrakis to produce the limited prescience necessary for guiding spaceships through the void, were “bothered about the future” or saw “problems on the horizon.” This could only mean they saw a nexus, a meeting place of countless delicate decisions, beyond which the path was hidden from the prescient eye. This was a clear indication that some agency was interfering with higher order dimensions!
   (A few of the Bene Gesserit had long been aware that the Guild could not interfere directly with the vital spice source because Guild navigators already were dealing in their own inept way with higher order dimensions, at least to the point where they recognized that the slightest misstep they made on Arrakis could be catastrophic. It was a known fact that Guild navigators could predict no way to take control of the spice without producing just such a nexus. The obvious conclusion was that someone of higher order powers was taking control of the spice source, yet the Bene Gesserit missed this point entirely!)
   In the face of these facts, one is led to the inescapable conclusion that the inefficient Bene Gesserit behavior in this affair was a product of an even higher plan of which they were completely unaware!

Appendix IV: The Almanak en-Ashraf (Selected Excerpts of the Noble Houses)

   SHADDAM IV (10,134-10,202)
   The Padishah Emperor, 81st of his line (House Corrino) to occupy the Golden Lion Throne, reigned from 10,156 (date his father, Elrood IX, succumbed to chaumurky) until replaced by the 10,196 Regency set up in the name of his eldest daughter, Irulan. His reign is noted chiefly for the Arrakis Revolt, blamed by many historians on Shaddam IV's dalliance with Court functions and the pomp of office. The ranks of Bursegs were doubled in the first sixteen years of his reign. Appropriations for Sardaukar training went down steadily in the final thirty years before the Arrakis Revolt. He had five daughters (Irulan, Chalice, Wensicia, Josifa, and Rugi) and no legal sons. Four of the daughters accompanied him into retirement. His wife, Anirul, a Bene Gesserit of Hidden Rank, died in 10,176.
   LETO ATREIDES (10,140-10,191)
   A distaff cousin of the Corrinos, he is frequently referred to as the Red Duke. House Atreides ruled Caladan as a siridar-fief for twenty generations until pressured into the move to Arrakis. He is known chiefly as the father of Duke Paul Muad'Dib, the Umma Regent. The remains of Duke Leto occupy the “Skull Tomb” on Arrakis. His death is attributed to the treachery of a Suk doctor, and is an act laid to the Siridar-Baron, Vladimir Harkonnen.
   LADY JESSICA (Hon. Atreides) (10,154-10,256)
   A natural daughter (Bene Gesserit reference) of the Siridar-Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Mother of Duke Paul Muad'Dib. She graduated from the Wallach IX B.G. School.
   LADY ALIA ATREIDES (10,191– )
   Legal daughter of Duke Leto-Atreides and his formal concubine, Lady Jessica. Lady Alia was born on Arrakis about eight months after Duke Leto's death. Prenatal exposure to an awareness-spectrum narcotic is the reason generally given for Bene Gesserit references to her as “Accursed One.” She is known in popular history as St. Alia or St. Alia-of-the-Knife. (For a detailed history, see St. Alia, Huntress of a Billion Worlds by Pander Oulson.)
   VLADIMIR HARKONNEN (10,110-10,193)
   Commonly referred to as Baron Harkonnen, his title is officially Siridar (planetary governor) Baron. Vladimir Harkonnen is the direct-line male descendant of the Bashar Abulurd Harkonnen who was banished for cowardice after the Battle of Corrin. The return of House Harkonnen to power generally is ascribed to adroit manipulation of the whale fur market and later consolidation with melange wealth from Arrakis. The Siridar-Baron died on Arrakis during the Revolt. Title passed briefly to the na-Baron, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen.
   COUNT HASIMIR FENRING (10,133-10,225)
   A distaff cousin of House Corrino, he was a childhood companion of Shaddam IV. (The frequently discredited Pirate History of Corrino related the curious story that Fenring was responsible for the chaumurky which disposed of Elrood IX.) All accounts agree that Fenring was the closest friend Shaddam IV possessed. The Imperial chores carried out by Count Fenring included that of Imperial Agent on Arrakis during the Harkonnen regime there and later Siridar-Absentia of Caladan. He joined Shaddam IV in retirement on Salusa Secundus.
   COUNT GLOSSU RABBAN (10,132-10,193)
   Glossu Rabban, Count of Lankiveil, was the eldest nephew of Vladimir Harkonnen. Glossu Rabban and Feyd-Rautha Rabban (who took the name Harkonnen when chosen for the Siridar-Baron's household) were legal sons of the Siridar-Baron's youngest demibrother, Abulurd. Abulurd renounced the Harkonnen name and all rights to the title when given the subdistrict governorship of Rabban-Lankiveil. Rabban was a distaff name.

Terminology of the Imperium

   In studying the Imperium, Arrakis, and the whole culture which produced Muad'Dib, many unfamiliar terms occur. To increase understanding is a laudable goal, hence the definitions and explanations given below.

   ABA: loose robe worn by Fremen women; usually black.
   ACH: left turn: a worm-steersman's call.
   ADAB: the demanding memory that comes upon you of itself.
   AKARSO: a plant native to Sikun (of 70 Ophiuchi A) characterized by almost oblong leaves. Its green and white stripes indicate the constant multiple, condition of parallel active and dormant chlorophyll regions.
   ALAM AL-MITHAL: the mystical world of similitudes where all physical limitations are removed.
   AL-LAT: mankind's original sun; by usage: any planet's primary.
   AMPOLIROS: the legendary “Flying Dutchman” of space.
   AMTAL or AMTAL RULE: a common rule on primitive worlds under which something is tested to determine its limits or defects. Commonly: testing to destruction.
   AQL: the test of reason. Originally, the “Seven Mystic Questions” beginning: “Who is it that thinks?”
   ARRAKEEN: first settlement on Arrakis; long-time seat of planetary government.
   ARRAKIS: the planet known as Dune; third planet of Canopus.
   ASSASSINS' HANDBOOK: Third-century compilation of poisons commonly used in a War of Assassins. Later expanded to include those deadly devices permitted under the Guild Peace and Great Convention.
   AULIYA: In the Zensunni Wanderers' religion, the female at the left hand of God; God's handmaiden.
   AUMAS: poison administered in food. (Specifically: poison in solid food.) In some dialects: Chaumas.
   AYAT: the signs of life. (See Burhan.)

   BAKKA: in Fremen legend, the weeper who mourns for all mankind.
   BAKLAWA: a heavy pastry made with date syrup.
   BALISET: a nine-stringed musical instrument, lineal descendant of the zither, tuned to the Chusuk scale and played by strumming. Favorite instrument of Imperial troubadours.
   BARADYE PISTOL: a static-charge dust gun developed on Arrakis for laying down a large dye marker area on sand.
   BARAKA: a living holy man of magical powers.
   BASHAR (often Colonel Bashar): an officer of the Sardaukar a fractional point above Colonel in the standardized military classification. Rank created for military ruler of a planetary subdistrict. (Bashar of the Corps is a title reserved strictly for military use.)
   BATTLE LANGUAGE: any special language of restricted etymology developed for clear-speech communication in warfare.
   BEDWINE: see Ichwan Bedwine.
   BELA TEGEUSE: fifth planet of Kuentsing: third stopping place of the Zensunni (Fremen) forced migration.
   BENE GESSERIT: the ancient school of mental and physical training established primarily for female students after the Butlerian Jihad destroyed the so-called “thinking machines” and robots.
   B.G.: idiomatic for Bene Gesserit except when used with a date. With a date it signifies Before Guild and identifies the Imperial dating system based on the genesis of the Spacing Guild's monopoly.
   BHOTANIJIB: See Chakobsa.
   BI-LA KAIFA: Amen. (Literally: “Nothing further need be explained.”)
   BINDU: relating to the human nervous system, especially to nerve training. Often expressed as Bindu-nervature. (See Prana.)
   BINDU SUSPENSION: a special form of catalepsis, self-induced.
   BLED: flat, open desert.
   BOURKA: insulated mantle worn by Fremen in the open desert.
   BURHAN: the proofs of life. (Commonly: the ayat and burhan of life. See Ayat.)
   BURSEG: a commanding general of the Sardaukar.
   BUTLERIAN JIHAD; see Jihad, Butlerian (also Great Revolt).

   CAID: Sardaukar officer rank given to a military official whose duties call mostly for dealings with civilians; a military governorship over a full planetary district; above the rank of Bashar but not equal to a Burseg.
   CALADAN: third planet of Delta Pavonis; birthworld of Paul-Muad'Dib.
   CANTO and RESPONDU: an invocation rite, part of the panoplia propheticus of the Missionaria Protectiva.
   CARRYALL: a flying wing (commonly “wing”), the aerial workhorse of Arrakis, used to transport large spice mining, hunting, and refining equipment.
   CATCHPOCKET: any stillsuit pocket where filtered water is caught and stored.
   CHAKOBSA: the so-called “magnetic language” derived in part from the ancient Bhotani (Bhotani Jib – jib meaning dialect). A collection of ancient dialects modified by needs of secrecy, but chiefly the hunting language of the Bhotani, the hired assassins of the first Wars of Assassins.
   CHAUMAS (Aumas in some dialects): poison in solid food as distinguished from poison administered in some other way.
   CHAUMURKY (Musky or Murky in some dialects): poison administered in a drink.
   CHEOPS: pyramid chess; nine-level chess with the double object of putting your queen at the apex and the opponent's king in check.
   CHEREM: a brotherhood of hate (usually for revenge).
   CHOAM: acronym for Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles – the universal development corporation controlled by the Emperor and Great Houses with the Guild and Bene Gesserit as silent partners.
   CHUSUK: fourth planet of Theta Shalish; the so-called “Music Planet” noted for the quality of its musical instruments. (See Varota.)
   CIELAGO: any modified Chiroptera of Arrakis adapted to carry distrans messages.
   CONE OF SILENCE: the field of a distorter that limits the carrying power of the voice or any other vibrator by damping the vibrations with an image-vibration 180 degrees out of phase.
   CORIOLIS STORM: any major sandstorm on Arrakis where winds across the open flatlands are amplified by the planet's own revolutionary motion to reach speeds up to 700 kilometers per hour.
   CORRIN, BATTLE OF: the space battle from which the Imperial House Corrino took its name. The battle fought near Sigma Draconis in the year 88 B.G. settled the ascendancy of the ruling House from Salusa Secundus.
   COUSINES: blood relations beyond cousins.
   CRUSHERS: military space vessels composed of many smaller vessels locked together and designed to fall on an enemy position, crushing it.
   CUTTERAY: short-range version of lasgun used mostly as a cutting tool and surgeon's scalpel.
   CRYSKNIFE: the sacred knife of the Fremen on Arrakis. It is manufactured in two forms from teeth taken from dead sandworms. The two forms are “fixed” and “unfixed.” An unfixed knife requires proximity to a human body's electrical field to prevent disintegration. Fixed knives are treated for storage. All are about 20 centimeters long.

   DAR AL-HIKMAN: school of religious translation or interpretation.
   DARK THINGS: idiomatic for the infectious superstitions taught by the Missionaria Protectiva to susceptible civilizations.
   DEATH TRIPOD: originally; the tripod upon which desert executioners hanged their victims. By usage: the three members of a Cherem sworn to the same revenge.
   DERCH: right turn; a worm steersman's call.
   DEW COLLECTORS or DEW PRECIPITATORS: not to be confused with dew gatherers. Collectors or precipitators are egg-shaped devices about four centimeters on the long axis. They are made of chromoplastic that turns a reflecting white when subjected to light, and reverts to transparency in darkness. The collector forms a markedly cold surface upon which dawn dew will precipitate. They are used by Fremen to line concave planting depressions where they provide a small but reliable source of water.
   DEW GATHERERS: workers who reap dew from the plants of Arrakis, using a scythelike dew reaper.
   DEMIBROTHERS: sons of concubines in the same household and certified as having the same father.
   DICTUM FAMILIA: that rule of the Great Convention which prohibits the slaying of a royal person or member of a Great House by informal treachery. The rule sets up the formal outline and limits the means of assassination.
   DISTRANS: a device for producing a temporary neural imprint on the nervous system of Chiroptera or birds. The creature's normal cry then carries the message imprint which can be sorted from that carrier wave by another distrans.
   DRUM SAND: impaction of sand in such away that any sudden blow against its surface produces a distinct drum sound.
   DOORSEAL: a portable plastic hermetic seal used for moisture security in Fremen overday cave camps.
   DUMP BOXES: the general term for any cargo container of irregular shape and equipped with ablation surfaces and suspensor damping system. They are used to dump material from space onto a planet's surface.
   DUNE MEN: idiomatic for open sand workers, spice hunters and the like on Arrakis. Sandworkers. Spiceworkers.
   DUST CHASM: any deep crevasse or depression on the desert of Arrakis that has been filled with dust not apparently different from the surrounding surface; a deadly trap because human or animal will sink in it and smother. (See Tidal Dust Basin.)

   ECAZ: fourth planet of Alpha Centauri B; the sculptors' paradise, so called because it is the home of fogwood, the plant growth capable of being shaped in situ solely by the power of human thought.
   EGO-LIKENESS: portraiture reproduced through a shigawire projector that is capable of reproducing subtle movements said to convey the ego essence.
   ELACCA DRUG: narcotic formed by burning blood-grained elacca wood of Ecas. Its effect is to remove most of the will to self-preservation. Druggee skin shows a characteristic carrot color. Commonly used to prepare slave gladiators for the ring.
   EL-SAYAL: the “rain of sand.” A fall of dust which has been carried to medium altitude (around 2,000 meters) by a coriolis storm. El-sayals frequently bring moisture to ground level.
   ERG: an extensive dune area, a sea of sand.

   FAI: the water tribute, chief specie of tax on Arrakis.
   FANMETAL: metal formed by the growing of jasmium crystals in duraluminum; noted for extreme tensile strength in relationship to weight. Name derives from its common use in collapsible structures that are opened by “fanning” them out.
   FAUFRELUCHES; the rigid rule of class distinction enforced by the Imperium. “A place for every man and every man in his place.”
   FEDAYKIN: Fremen death commandos; historically: a group formed and pledged to give their lives to right a wrong.
   FILMBOOK: any shigawire imprint used in training and carrying a mnemonic pulse.
   FILT-PLUG: a nose filter unit worn with a stillsuit to capture moisture from the exhaled breath.
   FIQH: knowledge, religious law; one of the half-legendary origins of the Zensunni Wanderers' religion.
   FIRE, PILLAR OF: a simple pyrocket for signaling across the open desert.
   FIRST MOON: the major satellite of Arrakis, first to rise in the night; notable for a distinct human fist pattern on its surface.
   FREE TRADERS: idiomatic for smugglers.
   FREMEN: the free tribes of Arrakis, dwellers in the desert, remnants of the Zensunni Wanderers. ("Sand Pirates" according to the Imperial Dictionary.)
   FREMKIT: desert survival kit of Fremen manufacture.
   FRIGATE: largest spaceship that can be grounded on a planet and taken off in one piece.

   GALACH: official language of the Imperium. Hybrid Inglo-Slavic with strong traces of cultural-specialization terms adopted during the long chain of human migrations.
   GAMONT: third planet of Niushe; noted for its hedonistic culture and exotic sexual practices.
   GARE: butte.
   GATHERING: distinguished from Council Gathering. It is a formal convocation of Fremen leaders to witness a combat that determines tribal leadership. (A Council Gathering is an assembly to arrive at decisions involving all the tribes.)
   GEYRAT: straight ahead; a worm steersman's call.
   GHAFLA: giving oneself up to gadfly distractions. Thus: a changeable person, one not to be trusted.
   GHANIMA: something acquired in battle or single combat. Commonly, a memento of combat kept only to stir the memory.
   GIEDI PRIME: the planet of Ophiuchi B (36), homeworld of House Harkonnen. A median-viable planet with a low active-photosynthesis range.
   GINAZ, HOUSE OF: one-time allies of Duke Leto Atreides. They were defeated in the War of Assassins with Grumman.
   GIUDICHAR: a holy truth. (Commonly seen in the expression Giudichar mantene: an original and supporting truth.)
   GLOWGLOBE: suspensor-buoyed illuminating device, self-powered (usually by organic batteries).
   GRABEN: a long geological ditch formed when the ground sinks because of movements in the underlying crustal layers.
   GREAT CONVENTION: the universal truce enforced under the power balance maintained by the Guild, the Great Houses, and the Imperium. Its chief rule prohibits the use of atomic weapons against human targets. Each rule of the Great Convention begins: "The forms must be obeyed . . . "
   GREAT MOTHER: the horned goddess, the feminine principle of space (commonly: Mother Space), the feminine face of the male-female-neuter trinity accepted as Supreme Being by many religions within the Imperium.
   GREAT REVOLT: common term for the Butlerian Jihad. (See Jihad, Butlerian.)
   GRIDEX PLANE: a differential-charge separator used to remove sand from the melange spice mass; a device of the second stage in spice refining.
   GRUMMAN: second planet of Niushe, noted chiefly for the feud of its ruling House (Moritani) with House Ginaz.
   GOM JABBAR; the high-handed enemy; that specific poison needle tipped with meta-cyanide used by Bene Gesserit Proctors in the death-alternative test of human awareness.
   GUILD: the Spacing Guild, one leg of the political tripod maintaining the Great Convention. The Guild was the second mental-physical training school (see Bene Gesserit) after the Butlerian Jihad. The Guild monopoly on space travel and transport and upon international banking is taken as the beginning point of the Imperial Calendar.

   HAGAL: the “Jewel Planet” (II Theta Shaowei), mined out in the time of Shaddam I.
   HAIIIII-YOH!: command to action; worm steersman's call.
   HAJJ: holy journey.
   HARJ: desert journey, migration.
   HAJRA: journey of seeking.
   HAL YAWM: “Now! At last!” a Fremen exclamation.
   HARMONTHEP: Ingsley gives this as the planet name for the sixth stop in the Zensunni migration. It is supposed to have been a no longer existent satellite of Delta Pavonis.
   HARVESTER or HARVESTER FACTORY: a large (often 120 meters by 40 meters) spice mining machine commonly employed on rich, uncontaminated melange blows. (Often called a “crawler” because of buglike body on independent tracks.)
   HEIGHLINER: major cargo carrier of the Spacing Guild's transportation system.
   HIEREG: temporary Fremen desert camp on open sand.
   HIGH COUNCIL: the Landsraad inner circle empowered to act as supreme tribunal in House to House disputes.
   HOLTZMAN EFFECT: the negative repelling effect of a shield generator.
   HOOKMAN: Fremen with Maker hooks prepared to catch a sandworm.
   HOUSE: idiomatic for Ruling Clan of a planet or planetary system.
   HOUSES MAJOR: holders of planetary fiefs; interplanetary entrepreneurs. (See House above.)
   HOUSES MINOR: planet-bound entrepreneur class (Galach: “Richece”).
   HUNTER-SEEKER: a ravening sliver of suspensor-buoyed metal guided as a weapon by a near-by control console; common assassination device.

   IBAD, EYES OF: characteristic effect of a diet high in melange wherein the whites and pupils of the eyes turn a deep blue (indicative of deep melange addiction).
   IBN QIRTAIBA: “Thus go the holy words . . .” Formal beginning to Fremen religious incantation (derived from panoplia propheticus).
   ICHWAN BEDWINE: the brotherhood of all Fremen on Arrakis.
   IJAZ: prophecy that by its very nature cannot be denied; immutable prophecy.
   IKHUT-EIGH!: cry of the water-seller on Arrakis (etymology uncertain). See Soo-Soo Sook!
   ILM: theology; science of religious tradition; one of the half-legendary origins of the Zensunni Wanderers' faith.
   IMPERIAL CONDITIONING: a development of the Suk Medical Schools: the highest conditioning against taking human life. Initiates are marked by a diamond tattoo on the forehead and are permitted to wear their hair long and bound by a silver Suk ring.
   INKVINE: a creeping plant native to Giedi Prime and frequently used as a whip in the slave cribs. Victims are marked by beet-colored tattoos that cause residual pain for many years.
   ISTISLAH: a rule for the general welfare; usually a preface to brutal necessity. IX: see Richese.

   JIHAD: a religious crusade; fanatical crusade.
   JIHAD, BUTLERIAN: (see also Great Revolt) – the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
   JUBBA CLOAK: the all-purpose cloak (it can beset to reflect or admit radiant heat, converts to a hammock or shelter) commonly worn over a stillsuit on Arrakis.
   JUDGE OF THE CHANGE: an official appointed by the Landsraad High Council and the Emperor to monitor a change of fief, a kanly negotiation, or formal battle in a War of Assassins. The Judge's arbitral authority may be challenged only before the High Council with the Emperor present.

   KANLY: formal feud or vendetta under the rules of the Great Convention carried on according to the strictest limitations. (See Judge of the Change.) Originally the rules were designed to protect innocent bystanders.
   KARAMA: a miracle; an action initiated by the spirit world.
   KHALA: traditional invocation to still the angry spirits of a place whose name you mention.
   KINDJAL: double bladed short sword (or long knife) with about 20 centimeters of slightly curved blade.
   KISWA; any figure or design from Fremen mythology.
   KITAB AL-IBAR: the combined survival handbook-religious manual developed by the Fremen on Arrakis.
   KRIMSKELL FIBER or KRIMSKELL ROPE: the “claw fiber” woven from strands of the hufuf vine from Ecaz. Knots tied in krimskell will claw tighter and tighter to preset limits when the knot-lines are pulled. (For a more detailed study, see Holjance Vohnbrook's “The Strangler Vines of Ecaz.”)
   KULL WAHAD!: “I am profoundly stirred!” A sincere exclamation of surprise common in the Imperium. Strict interpretation depends on context. (It is said of Muad'Dib that once he watched a desert hawk chick emerge from its shell and whispered: “Kull wahad!”)
   KULON: wild ass of Terra's Asiatic steppes adapted for Arrakis.
   KWISATZ HADERACH: “Shortening of the Way.” This is the label applied by the Bene Gesserit to the unknown for which they sought a genetic solution: a male Bene Gesserit whose organic mental powers would bridge space and time.

   LA, LA, LA: Fremen cry of grief. (La translates as ultimate denial, a “no” from which you cannot appeal.)
   LASGUN: continuous-wave laser projector. Its use as a weapon is limited in a field-generator-shield culture because of the explosive pyrotechnics (technically, subatomic fusion) created when its beam intersects a shield.
   LEGION, IMPERIAL: ten brigades (about 30,000 men).
   LIBAN: Fremen liban is spice water infused with yucca flour. Originally a sour milk drink.
   LISAN AL-GAIB: “The Voice from the Outer World.” In Fremen messianic legends, an off-world prophet. Sometimes translated as “Giver of Water.” (See Mahdi.)
   LITERJON: a one-liter container for transporting water on Arrakis; made of high-density, shatterproof plastic with positive seal.
   LITTLE MAKER: the half-plant-half-animal deep-sand vector of the Arrakis sandworm. The Little Maker's excretions form the pre-spice mass.

   MAHDI: in the Fremen messianic legend, “The One Who Will Lead Us to Paradise.”
   MAKER: see Shai-hulud.
   MAKER HOOKS: the hooks used for capturing, mounting, and steering a sandworm of Arrakis.
   MANTENE: underlying wisdom, supporting argument, first principle. (See Giudichar.)
   MATING INDEX: the Bene Gesserit master record of its human breeding program aimed at producing the Kwisatz Haderach.
   MAULA: slave.
   MAULA PISTOL: spring-loaded gun for firing poison darts; range about forty meters.
   MELANGE: the “spice of spices,” the crop for which Arrakis is the unique source. The spice, chiefly noted for its geriatric qualities, is mildly addictive when taken in small quantities, severely addictive when imbibed in quantities above two grams daily per seventy kilos of body weight. (See Ibad, Water of Life, and Pre-spice Mass.) Muad'Dib claimed the spice as a key to his prophetic powers. Guild navigators make similar claims. Its price on the Imperial market has ranged as high as 620,000 Solaris the decagram.
   MENTAT: that class of Imperial citizens trained for supreme accomplishments of logic. “Human computers.”
   METAGLASS: glass grown as a high-temperature gas infusion in sheets of jasmium quartz. Noted for extreme tensile strength (about 450,000 kilos per square centimeter at two centimeters' thickness) and capacity as a selective radiation filter.
   MIHNA: the season for testing Fremen youths who wish admittance to manhood.
   MINIMIC FILM: shigawire of one-micron diameter often used to transmit espionage and counterespionage data.
   MISH-MISH: apricots.
   MISR: the historical Zensunni(Fremen) term for themselves: “The People.”
   MISSIONARIA PROTECTIVA: the arm of the Bene Gesserit order charged with sowing infectious superstitions on primitive worlds, thus opening those regions to exploitation by the Bene Gesserit. (See Panoplia propheticus.)
   MONITOR: a ten-section space warcraft mounting heavy armor and shield protection. It is designed to be separated into its component sections for lift-off after planet-fall.
   MUAD'DIB: the adapted kangaroo mouse of Arrakis, a creature associated in the Fremen earth-spirit mythology with a design visible on the planet's second moon. This creature is admired by Fremen for its ability to survive in the open desert.
   MUDIR NAHYA: the Fremen name for Beast Rabban (Count Rabban of Lankiveil), the Harkonnen cousin who was siridar governor on Arrakis for many years. The name is often translated as “Demon Ruler.”
   MUSHTAMAL: a small garden annex or garden courtyard.
   MUSKY: poison in a drink. (See Chaumurky.)
   MU ZEIN WALLAH!: Mu zein literally means “nothing good,” and wallah is a reflexive terminal exclamation. In this traditional opening for a Fremen curse against an enemy, Wallah turns the emphasis back upon the words Mu zein, producing the meaning: “Nothing good, never good, good for nothing.”

   Na-: a prefix meaning “nominated” or “next in line.” Thus: na-Baron means heir apparent to a barony.
   NAIB: one who has sworn never to be taken alive by the enemy; traditional oath of a Fremen leader.
   NEZHONI SCARF: the scarf-pad worn at the forehead beneath the stillsuit hood by married or “associated” Fremen women after birth of a son.
   NOUKKERS: officers of the Imperial bodyguard who are related to the Emperor by blood. Traditional rank for sons of royal concubines.

   OIL LENS: hufuf oil held in static tension by an enclosing force field within a viewing tube as part of a magnifying or other light-manipulation system. Because each lens element can be adjusted individually one micron at a time, the oil lens is considered the ultimate in accuracy for manipulating visible light.
   OPAFIRE: one of the rare opaline jewels of Hagal.
   ORANGE CATHOLIC BIBLE: the “Accumulated Book,” the religious text produced by the Commission of Ecumenical Translators. It contains elements of most ancient religions, including the Maometh Saari, Mahayana Christianity, Zensunni Catholicism and Buddislamic traditions. Its supreme commandment is considered to be: “Thou shall not disfigure the soul.”
   ORNITHOPTER (commonly: 'thopter): any aircraft capable of sustained wing-beat flight in the manner of birds.
   OUT-FREYN: Galach for “immediately foreign,” that is: not of your immediate community, not of the select.

   PALM LOCK: any lock or seal which may be opened on contact with the palm of the human hand to which it has been keyed.
   PAN: on Arrakis, any low-lying region or depression created by the subsiding of the underlying basement complex. (On planets with sufficient water, a pan indicates a region once covered by open water. Arrakis is believed to have at least one such area, although this remains open to argument.)
   PANOPLIA PROPHETICUS: term covering the infectious superstitions used by the Bene Gesserit to exploit primitive regions. (See Missionaria Protectiva.)
   PARACOMPASS: any compass that determines direction by local magnetic anomaly; used where relevant charts are available and where a planet's total magnetic field is unstable or subject to masking by severe magnetic storms.
   PENTASHIELD: a five-layer shield-generator field suitable for small areas such as doorways or passages (large reinforcing shields become increasingly unstable with each successive layer) and virtually impassable to anyone not wearing a dissembler tuned to the shield codes. (See Prudence Door.)
   PLASTEEL: steel which has been stabilized with stravidium fibers grown into its crystal structure.
   PLENISCENTA: an exotic green bloom of Ecaz noted for its sweet aroma.
   POLING THE SAND: the art of placing plastic and fiber poles in the open desert wastes of Arrakis and reading the patterns etched on the poles by sandstorms as a clue to weather prediction.
   PORITRIN: third planet of Epsilon Alangue, considered by many Zensunni Wanderers as their planet of origin, although clues in their language and mythology show far more ancient planetary roots.
   PORTYGULS: oranges.
   PRANA (Prana-musculature): the body's muscles when considered as units for ultimate training. (See Bindu.)
   PRE-SPICE MASS: the stage of fungusoid wild growth achieved when water is flooded into the excretions of Little Makers. At this stage, the spice of Arrakis forms a characteristic “blow,” exchanging the material from deep underground for the matter on the surface above it. This mass, after exposure to sun and air, becomes melange (See also Melange and Water of Life.)
   PROCES VERBAL: a semiformal report alleging a crime against the Imperium. Legally: an action falling between a loose verbal allegation and a formal charge of crime.
   PROCTOR SUPERIOR: a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother who is also regional director of a B.G. school. (Commonly: Bene Gesserit with the Sight.)
   PRUDENCE DOOR or PRUDENCE BARRIER (idiomatically: pru-door or pru-barrier): any pentashield situated for the escape of selected persons under conditions of pursuit. (See Pentashield.)
   PUNDI RICE: a mutated rice whose grains, high in natural sugar, achieve lengths up to four centimeters; chief export of Caladan.
   PYONS: planet-bound peasants or laborers, one of the base classes under the Faufreluches. Legally: wards of the planet.
   PYRETIC CONSCIENCE: so-called “conscience of fire”; that inhibitory level touched by Imperial conditioning. (See Imperial conditioning.)

   QANAT: an open canal for carrying irrigation water under controlled conditions through a desert.
   QIRTAIBA; see Ibn Qirtaiba.
   QUIZARA TAFWID: Fremen priests (after Muad'Dib).

   RACHAG: a caffeine-type stimulant from the yellow berries of akarso. (See Akarso.)
   RAMADHAN: ancient religious period marked by fasting and prayer; traditionally, the ninth month of the solar-lunar calendar. Fremen mark the observance according to the ninth meridian-crossing cycle of the first moon.
   RAZZIA: a semipiratical guerrilla raid.
   RECATHS: body-function tubes linking the human waste disposal system to the cycling filters of a stillsuit.
   REPKIT: repair and replacement essentials for a stillsuit.
   RESIDUAL POISON: an innovation attributed to the Mentat Piter de Vries whereby the body is impregnated with a substance for which repeated antidotes must be administered. Withdrawal of the antidote at any time brings death.
   REVEREND MOTHER: originally, a proctor of the Bene Gesserit, one who has transformed an “illuminating poison” within her body, raising herself to a higher state of awareness. Title adopted by Fremen for their own religious leaders who accomplished a similar “illumination.” (See also Bene Gesserit and Water of Life.)
   RICHESE: fourth planet of Eridani A, classed with Ix as supreme in machine culture. Noted for miniaturization. (For a detailed study on how Richese and lx escaped the more severe effects of the Butlerian Jihad, see The Last Jihad by Sumer and Kautman.)
   RIMWALL: second upper Step of the protecting bluffs on the Shield Wall of Arrakis. (See Shield Wall.)
   RUH-SPIRIT: in Fremen belief, that part of the individual which is always rooted in (and capable of sensing) the metaphysical world. (See Alam al-Mithal.)

   SADUS: judges. The Fremen title refers to holy judges, equivalent to saints.
   SALUSA SECUNDUS: third planet of Gamma Waiping; designated Imperial Prison Planet after removal of the Royal Court to Kaitain. Salusa Secundus is homeworld of House Corrino, and the second stopping point in migrations of the Wandering Zensunni. Fremen tradition says they were slaves on S.S. for nine generations.
   SANDCRAWLER: general term for machinery designed to operate on the Arrakis surface in hunting and collecting melange.
   SANDMASTER: general superintendent of spice operations.
   SANDRIDER: Fremen term for one who is capable of capturing and riding a sandworm.
   SANDSNORK: breathing device for pumping surface air into a sandcovered stilltent.
   SANDTIDE: idiomatic for a dust tide: the variation in level within certain dust-filled basins on Arrakis due to gravitational effects of sun and satellites. (See Tidal Dust Basin.)
   SANDWALKER: any Fremen trained to survive in the open desert.
   SANDWORM: See Shai-Hulud.
   SAPHO: high-energy liquid extracted from barrier roots of Ecaz. Commonly used by Mentats who claim it amplifies mental powers. Users develop deep ruby stains on mouth and lips.
   SARDAUKAR: the soldier-fanatics of the Padishah Emperor. They were men from an environmental background of such ferocity that it killed six out of thirteen persons before the age of eleven. Their military training emphasized ruthlessness and a near-suicidal disregard for personal safety. They were taught from infancy to use cruelty as a standard weapon, weakening opponents with terror. At the apex of their sway over the affairs of the Universe, their swordsmanship was said to match that of the Ginaz tenth level and their cunning abilities at in-fighting were reputed to approach those of a Bene Gesserit adept. Any one of them was rated a match for any ten ordinary Landsraad military conscripts. By the time of Shaddam IV, while they were still formidable, their strength had been sapped by overconfidence, and the sustaining mystique of their warrior religion had been deeply undermined by cynicism.
   SARFA: the act of turning away from God.
   SAYYADINA: feminine acolyte in the Fremen religious hierarchy.
   SCHLAG: animal native to Tupile once hunted almost to extinction for its thin, tough hide.
   SECOND MOON: the smaller of the two satellites of Arrakis, noteworthy for the kangaroo mouse figure in its surface markings.
   SELAMLIK: Imperial audience chamber.
   SEMUTA: the second narcotic derivative (by crystal extraction) from burned residue of elacca wood. The effect (described as timeless, sustained ecstasy) is elicited by certain atonal vibrations referred to as semuta music.
   SERVOK: clock-set mechanism to perform simple tasks; one of the limited “automatic” devices permitted after the Butlerian Jihad.
   SHAH-NAMA: the half-legendary First Book of the Zensunni Wanderers.
   SHAI-HULUD: Sandworm of Arrakis, the “Old Man of the Desert,” “Old Father Eternity,” and “Grandfather of the Desert.” Significantly, this name, when referred to in a certain tone or written with capital letters, designates the earth deity of Fremen hearth superstitions. Sandworms grow to enormous size (specimens longer than 400 meters have been seen in the deep desert) and live to great age unless slain by one of their fellows or drowned in water, which is poisonous to them. Most of the sand on Arrakis is credited to sandworm action. (See Little Maker.)
   SHARI-A: that part of the panoplia propheticus which sets forth the superstitious ritual. (See Missionaria Protectiva.)
   SHADOUT: well-dipper, a Fremen honorific.
   SHAITAN: Satan.
   SHIELD, DEFENSIVE: the protective field produced by a Holtzman generator. This field derives from Phase One of the suspensor-nullification effect. A shield will permit entry only to objects moving at slow speeds (depending on setting, this speed ranges from six to nine centimeters per second) and can be shorted out only by a shire-sized electric field. (See Lasgun.)
   SHIELD WALL: a mountainous geographic feature in the northern reaches of Arrakis which protects a small area from the full force of the planet's coriolis storms.
   SHIGAWIRE: metallic extrusion of a ground vine. (Narvi narviium) grown only on Salusa Secundus and III Delta Kaising. It is noted for extreme tensile strength.
   SIETCH: Fremen: "Place of assembly in time of danger. "Because the Fremen lived so long in peril, the term came by general usage to designate any cave warren inhabited by one of their tribal communities.
   SIHAYA: Fremen: the desert springtime with religious overtones implying the time of fruitfulness and “the paradise to come.”
   SINK: a habitable lowland area on Arrakis surrounded by high ground that protects it from the prevailing storms.
   SINKCHART: map of the Arrakis surface laid out with reference to the most reliable paracompass routes between places of refuge. (See Paracompass.)
   SIRAT: the passage in the O.C. Bible that describes human life as a journey across a narrow bridge (the Sirat) with “Paradise on my right. Hell on my left, and the Angel of Death behind.”
   SLIP-TIP: any thin, short blade (often poison-tipped) for left-hand use in shield fighting.
   SNOOPER, POISON: radiation analyzer within the olfactory spectrum and keyed to detect poisonous substances.
   SOLARI: official monetary unit of the Imperium, its purchasing power set at quatricentennial negotiations between the Guild, the Landsraad, and the Emperor.
   SOLIDO: the three-dimensional image from a solido projector using 360-degree reference signals imprinted on a shigawire reel. Ixian solido projectors are commonly considered the best.
   SONDAGI; the fern tulip of Tupali.
   SOO-SOO SOOK!: water-seller's cry on Arrakis. Sook is a market place. (See Ikhut-eigh!)
   SPACING GUILD: see Guild.
   SPICE: see Melange.
   SPICE DRIVER: any Dune man who controls and directs movable machinery on the desert surface of Arrakis.
   SPICE FACTORY: see Sandcrawler.
   SPOTTER CONTROL: the light ornithopter in a spice-hunting group charged with control of watch and protection.
   STILLSUIT: body-enclosing garment invented on Arrakis. Its fabric is a micro-sandwich performing functions of heat dissipation and filter for bodily wastes. Reclaimed moisture is made available by tube from catchpockets.
   STILLTENT: small, scalable enclosure of micro-sandwich fabric designed to reclaim as potable water the ambient moisture discharged within it by the breath of its occupants.
   STUNNER: slow-pellet projectile weapon throwing a poison– or drug-tipped dart. Effectiveness limited by variations in shield settings and relative motion between target and projectile.
   SUBAKH UL KUHAR: “Are you well?”: a Fremen greeting.
   SUBAKH UN NAR: “I am well. And you?”: traditional reply.
   SUSPENSOR: secondary (low-drain) phase of a Holtzman field generator. It nullifies gravity within certain limits prescribed by relative mass and energy consumption.

   TAHADDI AL-BURHAN: an ultimate test from which there can be no appeal (usually because it brings death or destruction).
   TAHADDI CHALLENGE: Fremen challenge to mortal combat, usually to test some primal issue.
   TAQWA: literally: “The price of freedom.” Something of great value. That which a deity demands of a mortal (and the fear provoked by the demand).
   TAU, THE: in Fremen terminology, that oneness of a sietch community enhanced by spice diet and especially the tau orgy of oneness elicited by drinking the Water of Life.
   TEST-MASHAD: any test in which honor (defined as spiritual standing) is at stake.
   THUMPER: short stake with spring-driven clapper at one end. The purpose: to be driven into the sand and set “thumping” to summon shai-hulud. (See Maker hooks.)
   TIDAL DUST BASIN: any of the extensive depressions in the surface of Arrakis which have been filled with dust over the centuries and in which actual dust tides (see Sandtides) have been measured.
   TLEILAX: lone planet of Thalim, noted as renegade training center for Mentats; source of “twisted” Mentats.
   T-P: idiomatic for telepathy.
   TRAINING: when applied to Bene Gesserit, this otherwise common term assumes special meaning, referring to that conditioning of nerve and muscle (see Bindu and Prana) which is carried to the last possible notch permitted by natural function.
   TROOP CARRIER: any Guild ship designed specifically for transport of troops between planets.
   TRUTHSAYER: a Reverend Mother qualified to enter truthtrance and detect insincerity or falsehood.
   TRUTHTRANCE: semihypnotic trance induced by one of several “awareness spectrum” narcotics in which the petit betrayals of deliberate falsehood are apparent to the truthtrance observer. (Note: “awareness spectrum” narcotics are frequently fatal except to desensitized individuals capable of transforming the poison-configuration within their own bodies.)
   TUPILE: so-called “sanctuary planet” (probably several planets) for defeated Houses of the Imperium. Location(s) known only to the Guild and maintained inviolate under the Guild Peace.

   ULEMA: a Zensunni doctor of theology.
   UMMA: one of the brotherhood of prophets. (A term of scorn in the Imperium, meaning any “wild” person given to fanatical prediction.)
   UROSHNOR: one of several sounds empty of general meaning and which Bene Gesserit implant within the psyches of selected victims for purposes of control. The sensitized person, hearing the sound, is temporarily immobilized.
   USUL: Fremen: “The base of the pillar.”

   VAROTA: famed maker of balisets; a native of Chusuk.
   VERITE: one of the Ecaz will-destroying narcotics. It renders a person incapable of falsehood.
   VOICE: that combined training originated by the Bene Gesserit which permits an adept to control others merely by selected tone shadings of the voice.

   WALI: an untried Fremen youth.
   WALLACH IX: ninth planet of Laoujin, site of the Mother School of the Bene Gesserit.
   WAR OF ASSASSINS: the limited form of warfare permitted under the Great Convention and the Guild Peace. The aim is to reduce involvement of innocent bystanders. Rules prescribe formal declarations of intent and restrict permissible weapons.
   WATER BURDEN: Fremen: a mortal obligation.
   WATERCOUNTERS: metal rings of different size, each designating a specific amount of water payable out of Fremen stores. Watercounters have profound significance (far beyond the idea of money) especially in birth, death, and courtship ritual.
   WATER DISCIPLINE: that harsh training which fits the inhabitants of Arrakis for existence there without wasting moisture.
   WATERMAN: a Fremen consecrated for and charged with the ritual duties surrounding water and the Water of Life.
   WATER OF LIFE: an “illuminating” poison (see Reverend Mother). Specifically, that liquid exhalation of a sandworm (see Shai-hulud) produced at the moment of its death from drowning which is changed within the body of a Reverend Mother to become the narcotic used in the sietch tau orgy. An “awareness spectrum” narcotic.
   WATERTUBE: any tube within a stillsuit or stilltent that carries reclaimed water into a catchpocket or from the catchpocket to the wearer.
   WAY, BENE GESSERIT: use of the minutiae of observation.
   WEATHER SCANNER; a person trained in the special methods of predicting weather on Arrakis, including ability to pole the sand and read the wind patterns.
   WEIRDING: idiomatic: that which partakes of the mystical or of witchcraft.
   WINDTRAP: a device placed in the path of a prevailing wind and capable of precipitating moisture from the air caught within it, usually by a sharp and distinct drop in temperature within the trap.

   YA HYA CHOUHADA: “Long live the fighters!” The Fedaykin battle cry. Ya (now) in this cry is augmented by the hya form (the ever-extended now). Chouhada (fighters) carries this added meaning of fighters against injustice. There is a distinction in this word that specifies the fighters are not struggling for anything, but are consecrated against a specific thing – that alone.
   YALI: a Fremen's personal quarters within the sietch.
   YA! YA! YAWM!: Fremen chanting cadence used in time of deep ritual significance. Ya carries the root meaning of “Now pay attention!” The yawm form is a modified term calling for urgent immediacy. The chant is usually translated as “Now, hear this!”

   ZENSUNNI: followers of a schismatic sect that broke away from the teachings of Maometh (the so-called “Third Muhammed”) about 1381 B.G. The Zensunni religion is noted chiefly for its emphasis on the mystical and a reversion to “the ways of the fathers.” Most scholars name Ali Ben Ohashi as leader of the original schism but there is some evidence that Ohashi may have been merely the male spokesman for his second wife, Nisai.