Dune

How the mind gears itself for its environment, she thought. And she recalled a Bene Gesserit axiom: “The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.”

“It could be a good life here,” Paul said.

She tried to see the desert through his eyes, seeking to encompass all the rigors this planet accepted as commonplace, wondering at the possible futures Paul had glimpsed. One could be alone out here, she thought, without fear of someone behind you, without fear of the hunter.

She stepped past Paul, lifted her binoculars, adjusted the oil lenses and studied the escarpment across from them. Yes, saguaro in the arroyos and other spiny growth…and a matting of low grasses, yellow-green in the shadows.

“I’ll strike camp,” Paul said.

Jessica nodded, walked to the fissure’s mouth where she could get a sweep of the desert, and swung her binoculars to the left. A salt pan glared white there with a blending of dirty tan at its edges—a field of white out here where white was death. But the pan said another thing: water. At some time water had flowed across that glaring white. She lowered her binoculars, adjusted her burnoose, listened for a moment to the sound of Paul’s movements.

The sun dipped lower. Shadows stretched across the salt pan. Lines of wild color spread over the sunset horizon. Color streamed into a toe of darkness testing the sand. Coal-colored shadows spread, and the thick collapse of night blotted the desert.

Stars!

She stared up at them, sensing Paul’s movements as he came up beside her. The desert night focused upward with a feeling of lift toward the stars. The weight of the day receded. There came a brief flurry of breeze across her face.

“The first moon will be up soon,” Paul said. “The pack’s ready. I’ve planted the thumper.”

We could be lost forever in this hellplace, she thought. And no one to know.

The night wind spread sand runnels that grated across her face, bringing the smell of cinnamon: a shower of odors in the dark.

“Smell that,” Paul said.

“I can smell it even through the filter,” she said. “Riches. But will it buy water?” She pointed across the basin. “There are no artificial lights across there.”

“Fremen would be hidden in a sietch behind those rocks,” he said.

A sill of silver pushed above the horizon to their right: the first moon. It lifted into view, the hand pattern plain on its face. Jessica studied the white-silver of sand exposed in the light.

“I planted the thumper in the deepest part of the crevasse,” Paul said. “Whenever I light its candle it’ll give us about thirty minutes.”

“Thirty minutes?”

“Before it starts calling…a…worm.”

“Oh. I’m ready to go.”

He slipped away from her side and she heard his progress back up their fissure.

The night is a tunnel, she thought, a hole into tomorrow…if we’re to have a tomorrow. She shook her head. Why must I be so morbid? I was trained better than that!

Paul returned, took up the pack, led the way down to the first spreading dune where he stopped and listened as his mother came up behind him. He heard her soft progress and the cold single-grain dribbles of sound—the desert’s own code spelling out its measure of safety.

“We must walk without rhythm,” Paul said and he called up memory of men walking the sand…both prescient memory and real memory.

“Watch how I do it,” he said. “This is how Fremen walk the sand.”

He stepped out onto the windward face of the dune, following the curve of it, moved with a dragging pace.

Jessica studied his progress for ten steps, followed, imitating him. She saw the sense of it: they must sound like the natural shifting of sand…like the wind. But muscles protested this unnatural, broken pattern: Step…drag…drag…step…step…wait…drag…step….

Time stretched out around them. The rock face ahead seemed to grow no nearer. The one behind still towered high.

“Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!”

It was a drumming from the cliff behind.

“The thumper,” Paul hissed.

Its pounding continued and they found difficulty avoiding the rhythm of it in their stride.

“Lump…lump…lump…lump….”