Dune

Paul took the hornspout into his mouth, hearing the people shout. He felt the liquid gush into his throat as Chani pressed the sack, sensed giddiness in the fumes. Chani removed the spout, handed the sack into hands that reached for it from the floor of the cavern. His eyes focused on her arm, the green band of mourning there.

As she straightened, Chani saw the direction of his gaze, said: “I can mourn him even in the happiness of the waters. This was something he gave us.” She put her hand into his, pulling him along the ledge. “We are alike in a thing, Usul: We have each lost a father to the Harkonnens.”

Paul followed her. He felt that his head had been separated from his body and restored with odd connections. His legs were remote and rubbery.

They entered a narrow side passage, its walls dimly lighted by spaced-out glowglobes. Paul felt the drug beginning to have its unique effect on him, opening time like a flower. He found need to steady himself against Chani as they turned through another shadowed tunnel. The mixture of whipcord and softness he felt beneath her robe stirred his blood. The sensation mingled with the work of the drug, folding future and past into the present, leaving him the thinnest margin of trinocular focus.

“I know you, Chani,” he whispered. “We’ve sat upon a ledge above the sand while I soothed your fears. We’ve caressed in the dark of the sietch. We’ve….” He found himself losing focus, tried to shake his head, stumbled.

Chani steadied him, led him through thick hangings into the yellow warmth of a private apartment—low tables, cushions, a sleeping pad beneath an orange spread.

Paul grew aware that they had stopped, that Chani stood facing him, and that her eyes betrayed a look of quiet terror.

“You must tell me,” she whispered.

“You are Sihaya,” he said, “the desert spring.”

“When the tribe shares the Water,” she said, “we’re together—all of us. We…share. I can…sense the others with me, but I’m afraid to share with you.”

“Why?”

He tried to focus on her, but past and future were merging into the present, blurring her image. He saw her in countless ways and positions and settings.

“There’s something frightening in you,” she said. “When I took you away from the others…I did it because I could feel what the others wanted. You…press on people. You…make us see things!”

He forced himself to speak distinctly: “What do you see?”

She looked down at her hands. “I see a child…in my arms. It’s our child, yours and mine.” She put a hand to her mouth. “How can I know every feature of you?”

They’ve a little of the talent, his mind told him. But they suppress it because it terrifies.

In a moment of clarity, he saw how Chani was trembling.

“What is it you want to say?” he asked.

“Usul,” she whispered, and still she trembled.

“You cannot back into the future,” he said.

A profound compassion for her swept through him. He pulled her against him, stroked her head. “Chani, Chani, don’t fear.”

“Usul, help me,” she cried.

As she spoke, he felt the drug complete its work within him, ripping away the curtains to let him see the distant gray turmoil of his future.

“You’re so quiet,” Chani said.

He held himself poised in the awareness, seeing time stretch out in its weird dimension, delicately balanced yet whirling, narrow yet spread like a net gathering countless worlds and forces, a tightwire that he must walk, yet a teeter-totter on which he balanced.

On one side he could see the Imperium, a Harkonnen called Feyd-Rautha who flashed toward him like a deadly blade, the Sardaukar raging off their planet to spread pogrom on Arrakis, the Guild conniving and plotting, the Bene Gesserit with their scheme of selective breeding. They lay massed like a thunderhead on his horizon, held back by no more than the Fremen and their Muad’Dib, the sleeping giant Fremen poised for their wild crusade across the universe.

Paul felt himself at the center, at the pivot where the whole structure turned, walking a thin wire of peace with a measure of happiness, Chani at his side. He could see it stretching ahead of him, a time of relative quiet in a hidden sietch, a moment of peace between periods of violence.

“There’s no other place for peace,” he said.

“Usul, you’re crying,” Chani murmured. “Usul, my strength, do you give moisture to the dead? To whose dead?”

“To ones not yet dead,” he said.

“Then let them have their time of life,” she said.

He sensed through the drug fog how right she was, pulled her against him with savage pressure. “Sihaya!” he said.

She put a palm against his cheek. “I’m no longer afraid, Usul. Look at me. I see what you see when you hold me thus.”

“What do you see?” he demanded.

“I see us giving love to each other in a time of quiet between storms. It’s what we were meant to do.”