Dune

“Must we?” Irulan demanded.

“Perhaps . . . this is the time to discuss it,” Chani said.

Paul shook his head sharply. They couldn’t know that this was part of the price he had not yet decided to pay.

But Chani wasn’t to be stopped. “I have been to the prayer wall of Sietch Tabr where I was born,” she said. “I have submitted to doctors. I have knelt in the desert and sent my thoughts into the depths where dwells Shai-hulud. Yet”—she shrugged—“nothing avails.”

Science and superstition, all have failed her, Paul thought. Do I fail her, too, by not telling her what bearing an heir to House Atreides will precipitate? He looked up to find an expression of pity in Alia’s eyes. The idea of pity from his sister repelled him. Had she, too, seen that terrifying future?

“My Lord must know the dangers to his realm when he has no heir,” Irulan said, using her Bene Gesserit powers of voice with an oily persuasiveness. “These things are naturally difficult to discuss, but they must be brought into the open. An Emperor is more than a man. His figure leads the realm. Should he die without an heir, civil strife must follow. As you love your people, you cannot leave them thus?”

Paul pushed himself away from the table, strode to the balcony windows. A wind was flattening the smoke of the city’s fires out there. The sky presented a darkening silver-blue softened by the evening fall of dust from the Shield Wall. He stared southward at the escarpment which protected his northern lands from the coriolis wind, and he wondered why his own peace of mind could find no such shield.

The Council sat silently waiting behind him, aware of how close to rage he was.

Paul sensed time rushing upon him. He tried to force himself into a tranquility of many balances where he might shape a new future.

Disengage . . . disengage . . . disengage, he thought. What would happen if he took Chani, just picked up and left with her, sought sanctuary on Tupile? His name would remain behind. The Jihad would find new and more terrible centers upon which to turn. He’d be blamed for that, too. He felt suddenly fearful that in reaching for any new thing he might let fall what was most precious, that even the slightest noise from him might send the universe crashing back, receding until he never could recapture any piece of it.

Below him, the square had become the setting for a band of pilgrims in the green and white of the hajj. They wended their way like a disjointed snake behind a striding Arrakeen guide. They reminded Paul that his reception hall would be packed with supplicants by now. Pilgrims! Their exercise in homelessness had become a disgusting source of wealth for his Imperium. The hajj filled the space-ways with religious tramps. They came and they came and they came.

How did I set this in motion? he asked himself.

It had, of course, set itself in motion. It was in the genes which might labor for centuries to achieve this brief spasm.

Driven by that deepest religious instinct, the people came, seeking their resurrection. The pilgrimage ended here—“Arrakis, the place of rebirth, the place to die.”

Snide old Fremen said he wanted the pilgrims for their water.

What was it the pilgrims really sought? Paul wondered. They said they came to a holy place. But they must know the universe contained no Eden-source, no Tupile for the soul. They called Arrakis the place of the unknown where all mysteries were explained. This was a link between their universe and the next. And the frightening thing was that they appeared to go away satisfied.

What do they find here? Paul asked himself.

Often in their religious ecstasy, they filled the streets with screeching like some odd aviary. In fact, the Fremen called them “passage birds.” And the few who died here were “winged souls.”

With a sigh, Paul thought how each new planet his legions subjugated opened new sources of pilgrims. They came out of gratitude for “the peace of Muad’Dib.”

Everywhere there is peace, Paul thought. Everywhere . . . except in the heart of Muad’Dib.

He felt that some element of himself lay immersed in frosty hoar-darkness without end. His prescient power had tampered with the image of the universe held by all mankind. He had shaken the safe cosmos and replaced security with his Jihad. He had out-fought and out-thought and out-predicted the universe of men, but a certainty filled him that this universe still eluded him.

This planet beneath him which he had commanded be remade from desert into a water-rich paradise, it was alive. It had a pulse as dynamic as that of any human. It fought him, resisted, slipped away from his commands . . .