Dune

A sharp gasp escaped her.

He said: “When Stilgar told us our grandmother was delayed—I already knew that moment. Now my other dreams are suspect.”

“Leto . . .” She shook her head, eyes damp. “It came later for our father. Don’t you think it might be—”

“I’ve dreamed myself enclosed in armor and racing across the dunes,” he said. “And I’ve been to Jacurutu.”

“Jacu . . .” She cleared her throat. “That old myth!”

“A real place. Ghani! I must find this man they call The Preacher. I must find him and question him.”

“You think he’s . . . our father?”

“Ask yourself that question.”

“It’d be just like him,” she agreed, “but . . .”

“I don’t like the things I know I’ll do,” he said. “For the first time in my life I understand my father.”

She felt excluded from his thoughts, said: “The Preacher’s probably just an old mystic.”

“I pray for that,” he whispered. “Oh, how I pray for that!” He rocked forward, got to his feet. The baliset hummed in his hand as he moved. “Would that he were only Gabriel without a horn.” He stared silently at the moonlit desert.

She turned to look where he looked, saw the foxfire glow of rotting vegetation at the edge of the sietch plantings, then the clean blending into lines of dunes. That was a living place out there. Even when the desert slept, something remained awake in it. She sensed that wakefulness, hearing animals below her drinking at the qanat. Leto’s revelation had transformed the night: this was a living moment, a time to discover regularities within perpetual change, an instant in which to feel that long movement from their Terranic past, all of it encapsulated in her memories.

“Why Jacurutu?” she asked, and the flatness of her tone shattered the mood.

“Why . . . I don’t know. When Stilgar first told us how they killed the people there and made the place tabu, I thought . . . what you thought. But danger comes from there now . . . and The Preacher.”

She didn’t respond, didn’t demand that he share more of his prescient dreams with her, and she knew how much this told him of her terror. That way led to Abomination and they both knew it. The word hung unspoken between them as he turned and led the way back over the rocks to the sietch entrance. Abomination.

The Universe is God’s. It is one thing, a wholeness against which all separations may be identified. Transient life, even that self-aware and reasoning life which we call sentient, holds only fragile trusteeship on any portion of the wholeness.

—COMMENTARIES FROM THE C.E.T.

(COMMISSION OF ECUMENICAL TRANSLATORS)

Halleck used hand signals to convey the actual message while speaking aloud of other matters. He didn’t like the small anteroom the priests had assigned for this report, knowing it would be crawling with spy devices. Let them try to break the tiny hand signals, though. The Atreides had used this means of communication for centuries without anyone the wiser.

Night had fallen outside, but the room had no windows, depending upon glowglobes at the upper corners.

“Many of those we took were Alia’s people,” Halleck signaled, watching Jessica’s face as he spoke aloud, telling her the interrogation still continued.

“It was as you anticipated then,” Jessica replied, her fingers winking. She nodded and spoke an open reply: “I’ll expect a full report when you’re satisfied, Gurney.”

“Of course, My Lady,” he said, and his fingers continued: “There is another thing, quite disturbing. Under the deep drugs, some of our captives talked of Jacurutu and, as they spoke the name, they died.”

“A conditioned heart-stopper?” Jessica’s fingers asked. And she said: “Have you released any of the captives?”

“A few, My Lady—the more obvious culls.” And his fingers darted: “We suspect a heart-compulsion but are not yet certain. The autopsies aren’t completed. I thought you should know about this thing of Jacurutu, however, and came immediately.”

“My Duke and I always thought Jacurutu an interesting legend probably based on fact,” Jessica’s fingers said, and she ignored the usual tug of sorrow as she spoke of her long-dead love.

“Do you have orders?” Halleck asked, speaking aloud.

Jessica answered in kind, telling him to return to the landing field and report when he had positive information, but her fingers conveyed another message: “Resume contact with your friends among the smugglers. If Jacurutu exists, they’ll support themselves by selling spice. There’d be no other market for them except the smugglers.”

Halleck bowed his head briefly while his fingers said: “I’ve already set this course in motion, My Lady.” And because he could not ignore the training of a lifetime, added: “Be very careful in this place. Alia is your enemy and most of the priesthood belongs to her.”

“Not Javid,” Jessica’s fingers responded. “He hates the Atreides. I doubt anyone but an adept could detect it, but I’m positive of it. He conspires and Alia doesn’t know of it.”