Dune

Her temple guards had brought her a prisoner to judge at sunset the previous day: one Essas Paymon, a dark little man ostensibly in the pay of a house minor, the Nebiros, who traded in holy artifacts and small manufactured items for decoration. Actually Paymon was known to be a CHOAM spy whose task was to assess the yearly spice crop. Alia had been on the point of sending him into the dungeons when he’d protested loudly “the injustice of the Atreides.” That could have brought him an immediate sentence of death on the hanging tripod, but Alia had been caught by his boldness. She’d spoken sternly from her Throne of Judgment, trying to frighten him into revealing more than he’d already told her inquisitors.

“Why are our spice crops of such interest to the Combine Honnete?” she demanded. “Tell us and we may spare you.”

“I only collect something for which there is a market,” Paymon said. “I know nothing of what is done with my harvest.”

“And for this petty profit you interfere with our royal plans?” Alia demanded.

“Royalty never considers that we might have plans, too,” he countered.

Alia, captivated by his desperate audacity, said: “Essas Paymon, will you work for me?”

At this a grin whitened his dark face, and he said: “You were about to obliterate me without a qualm. What is my new value that you should suddenly make a market for it?”

“You’ve a simple and practical value,” she said. “You’re bold and you’re for hire to the highest bidder. I can bid higher than any other in the Empire.”

At which, he named a remarkable sum which he required for his services, but Alia laughed and countered with a figure she considered more reasonable and undoubtedly far more than he’d ever before received. She added: “And, of course, I throw in the gift of your life upon which, I presume, you place an even more inordinate value.”

“A bargain!” Paymon cried and, at a signal from Alia, was led away by her priestly Master of Appointments, Ziarenko Javid.

Less than an hour later, as Alia prepared to leave the Judgment Hall, Javid came hurrying to report that Paymon had been overheard to mutter the fateful lines from the Orange Catholic Bible: “Maleficos non patieris vivere.”

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Alia translated. So that was his gratitude! He was one of those who plotted against her very life! In a flush of rage such as she’d never before experienced, she ordered Paymon’s immediate execution, sending his body to the Temple deathstill where his water, at least, would be of some value in the priestly coffers.

And all night long Paymon’s dark face haunted her.

She tried all of her tricks against this persistent, accusing image, reciting the Bu Ji from the Fremen Book of Kreos: “Nothing occurs! Nothing occurs!” But Paymon took her through a wearing night into this giddy new day, where she could see that his face had joined those in the jeweled reflections from the dew.

A female guard called her to breakfast from the roof door behind a low hedge of mimosa. Alia sighed. She felt small choice between hells: the outcry within her mind or the outcry from her attendants—all were pointless voices, but persistent in their demands, hourglass noises that she would like to silence with the edge of a knife.

Ignoring the guard, Alia stared across the roof garden toward the Shield Wall. A bahada had left its broad outwash like a detrital fan upon the sheltered floor of her domain. The delta of sand spread out before her gaze, outlined by the morning sun. It came to her that an uninitiated eye might see that broad fan as evidence of a river’s flow, but it was no more than the place where her brother had shattered the Shield Wall with the Atreides Family atomics, opening a path from the desert for the sandworms which had carried his Fremen troops to shocking victory over his Imperial predecessor, Shaddam IV. Now a broad qanat flowed with water on the Shield Wall’s far side to block off sandworm intrusions. Sandworms would not cross open water; it poisoned them.

Would that I had such a barrier within my mind, she thought.

The thought increased her giddy sensation of being separated from reality.

Sandworms! Sandworms!

Her memory presented a collection of sandworm images: mighty Shai-Hulud, the demiurge of the Fremen, deadly beast of the desert’s depths whose outpourings included the priceless spice. How odd it was, this sandworm, to grow from a flat and leathery sandtrout, she thought. They were like the flocking multitude within her awareness. The sandtrout, when linked edge to edge against the planet’s bedrock, formed living cisterns; they held back the water that their sandworm vector might live. Alia could feel the analogy: some of those others within her mind held back dangerous forces which could destroy her.

Again the guard called her to breakfast, a note of impatience apparent.

Angrily Alia turned, waved a dismissal signal.