Dune

“No, I don’t!” Ghanima looked away from her brother’s probing stare, shuddered. She had only to consult her genetic memories and the Sisterhood’s warnings took on vivid shape. The pre-born observably tended to become adults of nasty habits. And the likely cause . . . Again she shuddered.

“Pity we don’t have a few pre-born in our ancestry,” Leto said.

“Perhaps we do.”

“But we’d . . . Ahh, yes, the old unanswered question: Do we really have open access to every ancestor’s total file of experiences?”

From his own inner turmoil, Leto knew how this conversation must be disturbing his sister. They’d considered this question many times, always without conclusion. He said: “We must delay and delay and delay every time she urges the trance upon us. Extreme caution with a spice overdose; that’s our best course.”

“An overdose would have to be pretty large,” Ghanima said.

“Our tolerance is probably high,” he agreed. “Look how much Alia requires.”

“I pity her,” Ghanima said. “The lure of it must’ve been subtle and insidious, creeping up on her until . . .”

“She’s a victim, yes,” Leto said. “Abomination.”

“We could be wrong.”

“True.”

“I always wonder,” Ghanima mused, “if the next ancestral memory I seek will be the one which . . .”

“The past is no farther away than your pillow,” Leto said.

“We must make the opportunity to discuss this with our grandmother.”

“So her memory within me urges,” Leto said.

Ghanima met his gaze. Then: “Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.”

The sietch at the desert’s rim

Was Liet’s, was Kynes’s,

Was Stilgar’s, was Muad’Dib’s

And, once more, was Stilgar’s.

The Naibs one by one sleep in the sand,

But the sietch endures.

—FROM A FREMEN SONG

Alia felt her heart pounding as she walked away from the twins. For a few pulsing seconds, she had felt herself near compulsion to stay with them and beg their help. What a foolish weakness! Memory of it sent a warning stillness through Alia. Would these twins dare practice prescience? The path which had engulfed their father must lure them—spice trance with its visions of the future wavering like gauze blown on a fickle wind.

Why cannot I see the future? Alia wondered. Much as I try, why does it elude me?

The twins must be made to try, she told herself. They could be lured into it. They had the curiosity of children and it was linked to memories which traversed millennia.

Just as I have, Alia thought.

Her guards opened the moisture seals at the State Entrance of the sietch, stood aside as she emerged onto the landing lip where the ornithopters waited. There was a wind from the desert blowing dust across the sky, but the day was bright. Emerging from the glowglobes of the sietch into the daylight sent her thoughts outward.

Why was the Lady Jessica returning at this moment? Had stories been carried to Caladan, stories of how the Regency was . . .

“We must hurry, My Lady,” one of her guards said, raising his voice above the wind sounds.

Alia allowed herself to be helped into her ornithopter and secured the safety harness, but her thoughts went leaping ahead.

Why now?

As the ornithopter’s wings dipped and the craft went skidding into the air, she felt the pomp and power of her position as physical things—but they were fragile, oh, how fragile!

Why now, when her plans were not completed?

The dust mists drifted, lifting, and she could see the bright sunlight upon the changing landscape of the planet: broad reaches of green vegetation where parched earth had once dominated.

Without a vision of the future, I could fail. Oh, what magic I could perform if only I could see as Paul saw! Not for me the bitterness which prescient visions brought.

A tormenting hunger shuddered through her and she wished she could put aside the power. Oh, to be as others were—blind in that safest of all blindnesses, living only the hypnoidal half-life into which birth-shock precipitated most humans. But no! She had been born an Atreides, victim of that eons-deep awareness inflicted by her mother’s spice addiction.

Why does my mother return today?

Gurney Halleck would be with her—ever the devoted servant, the hired killer of ugly mien, loyal and straightforward, a musician who played murder with a sliptip, or entertained with equal ease upon his nine-string baliset. Some said he’d become her mother’s lover. That would be a thing to ferret out; it might prove a most valuable leverage.

The wish to be as others were left her.

Leto must be lured into the spice trance.

She recalled asking the boy how he would deal with Gurney Halleck. And Leto, sensing undercurrents in her question, had said Halleck was loyal “to a fault,” adding: “He adored . . . my father.”