Dune

“He uses men to carry his distrans messages,” Farok said. “It demeans men to implant wave translators in them. A man’s voice should be his own to command. It should not carry another man’s message hidden within its sounds.”

Scytale shrugged. All great powers used the distrans in this age. One could never tell what obstacle might be placed between sender and addressee. The distrans defied political cryptology because it relied on subtle distortions of natural sound patterns which could be scrambled with enormous intricacy.

“Even his tax officials use this method,” Farok complained. “In my day, the distrans was implanted only in the lower animals.”

But revenue information must be kept secret, Scytale thought. More than one government has fallen because people discovered the real extent of official wealth.

“How do the Fremen cohorts feel now about Muad’Dib’s Jihad?” Scytale asked. “Do they object to making a god out of their Emperor?”

“Most of them don’t even consider this,” Farok said. “They think of the Jihad the way I thought of it—most of them. It is a source of strange experiences, adventure, wealth. This graben hovel in which I live”—Farok gestured at the courtyard—“it cost sixty lidas of spice. Ninety kontars! There was a time when I could not even imagine such riches.” He shook his head.

Across the courtyard, the blind youth took up the notes of a love ballad on his baliset.

Ninety kontars, Scytale thought. How strange. Great riches, certainly. Farok’s hovel would be a palace on many another world, but all things were relative—even the kontar. Did Farok, for example, know whence came his measure for this weight of spice? Did he ever think to himself that one and a half kontar once limited a camel load? Not likely. Farok might never even have heard of a camel or of the Golden Age of Earth.

His words oddly in rhythm to the melody of his son’s baliset, Farok said: “I owned a crysknife, water rings to ten liters, my own lance which had been my father’s, a coffee service, a bottle made of red glass older than any memory in my sietch. I had my own share of our spice, but no money. I was rich and did not know it. Two wives I had: one plain and dear to me, the other stupid and obstinate, but with form and face of an angel. I was a Fremen Naib, a rider of worms, master of the leviathan and of the sand.”

The youth across the courtyard picked up the beat of his melody.

“I knew many things without the need to think about them,” Farok said. “I knew there was water far beneath our sand, held there in bondage by the Little Makers. I knew that my ancestors sacrificed virgins to Shai-hulud . . . before Liet-Kynes made us stop. It was wrong of us to stop. I had seen the jewels in the mouth of a worm. My soul had four gates and I knew them all.”

He fell silent, musing.

“Then the Atreides came with his witch mother,” Scytale said.

“The Atreides came,” Farok agreed. “The one we named Usul in our sietch, his private name among us. Our Muad’Dib, our Mahdi! And when he called for the Jihad, I was one of those who asked: ‘Why should I go to fight there? I have no relatives there.’ But other men went—young men, friends, companions of my childhood. When they returned, they spoke of wizardry, of the power in this Atreides savior. He fought our enemy, the Harkonnen. Liet-Kynes, who had promised us a paradise upon our planet, blessed him. It was said this Atreides came to change our world and our universe, that he was the man to make the golden flower blossom in the night.”

Farok held up his hands, examined the palms. “Men pointed to First Moon and said: ‘His soul is there.’ Thus, he was called Muad’Dib. I did not understand all this.”

He lowered his hands, stared across the courtyard at his son. “I had no thoughts in my head. There were thoughts only in my heart and my belly and my loins.”

Again, the tempo of the background music increased.

“Do you know why I enlisted in the Jihad?” The old eyes stared hard at Scytale. “I heard there was a thing called a sea. It is very hard to believe in a sea when you have lived only here among our dunes. We have no seas. Men of Dune had never known a sea. We had our windtraps. We collected water for the great change Liet-Kynes promised us . . . this great change Muad’Dib is bringing with a wave of his hand. I could imagine a qanat, water flowing across the land in a canal. From this, my mind could picture a river. But a sea?”