Dune

“Chani, beloved,” he whispered, “do you know what I’d spend to end the Jihad—to separate myself from the damnable godhead the Qizarate forces onto me?”

She trembled. “You have but to command it,” she said.

“Oh, no. Even if I died now, my name would still lead them. When I think of the Atreides name tied to this religious butchery . . .”

“But you’re the Emperor! You’ve—”

“I’m a figurehead. When godhead’s given, that’s the one thing the so-called god no longer controls.” A bitter laugh shook him. He sensed the future looking back at him out of dynasties not even dreamed. He felt his being cast out, crying, unchained from the rings of fate—only his name continued. “I was chosen,” he said. “Perhaps at birth . . . certainly before I had much say in it. I was chosen.”

“Then un-choose,” she said.

His arm tightened around her shoulder. “In time, beloved. Give me yet a little time.”

Unshed tears burned his eyes.

“We should return to Sietch Tabr,” Chani said. “There’s too much to contend with in this tent of stone.”

He nodded, his chin moving against the smooth fabric of the scarf which covered her hair. The soothing spice smell of her filled his nostrils.

Sietch. The ancient Chakobsa word absorbed him: a place of retreat and safety in a time of peril. Chani’s suggestion made him long for vistas of open sand, for clean distances where one could see an enemy coming from a long way off.

“The tribes expect Muad’Dib to return to them,” she said. She lifted her head to look at him. “You belong to us.”

“I belong to a vision,” he whispered.

He thought then of the Jihad, of the gene mingling across parsecs and the vision which told him how he might end it. Should he pay the price? All the hatefulness would evaporate, dying as fires die—ember by ember. But . . . oh! The terrifying price!

I never wanted to be a god, he thought. I wanted only to disappear like a jewel of trace dew caught by the morning. I wanted to escape the angels and the damned—alone . . . as though by an oversight.

“Will we go back to the Sietch?” Chani pressed.

“Yes,” he whispered. And he thought: I must pay the price.

Chani heaved a deep sigh, settled back against him.

I’ve loitered, he thought. And he saw how he’d been hemmed in by boundaries of love and the Jihad. And what was one life, no matter how beloved, against all the lives the Jihad was certain to take? Could single misery be weighed against the agony of multitudes?

“Love?” Chani said, questioning.

He put a hand against her lips.

I’ll yield up myself, he thought. I’ll rush out while I yet have the strength, fly through a space a bird might not find. It was a useless thought, and he knew it. The Jihad would follow his ghost.

What could he answer? he wondered. How explain when people taxed him with brutal foolishness? Who might understand?

I wanted only to look back and say: “There! There’s an existence which couldn’t hold me. See! I vanish! No restraint or net of human devising can trap me ever again. I renounce my religion! This glorious instant is mine! I’m free!

What empty words!

“A big worm was seen below the Shield Wall yesterday,” Chani said. “More than a hundred meters long, they say. Such big ones come rarely into this region any more. The water repels them, I suppose. They say this one came to summon Muad’Dib home to his desert.” She pinched his chest. “Don’t laugh at me!”

“I’m not laughing.”

Paul, caught by wonder at the persistent Fremen mythos, felt a heart constriction, a thing inflicted upon his lifeline: adab, the demanding memory. He recalled his childhood room on Caladan then . . . dark night in the stone chamber . . . a vision! It’d been one of his earliest prescient moments. He felt his mind dive into the vision, saw through a veiled cloud-memory (vision-within-vision) a line of Fremen, their robes trimmed with dust. They paraded past a gap in tall rocks. They carried a long, cloth-wrapped burden.

And Paul heard himself say in the vision: “It was mostly sweet . . . but you were the sweetest of all . . .”

Adab released him.

“You’re so quiet,” Chani whispered. “What is it?”

Paul shuddered, sat up, face averted.

“You’re angry because I’ve been to the desert’s edge,” Chani said.

He shook his head without speaking.

“I only went because I want a child,” Chani said.