Dune

The guard obeyed, but the roof door slammed.

At the sound of the slamming door, Alia felt herself caught by everything she had attempted to deny. The other lives welled up within her like a hideous tide. Each demanding life pressed its face against her vision centers—a cloud of faces. Some presented mange-spotted skin, other were callous and full of sooty shadows; there were mouths like moist lozenges. The pressure of the swarm washed over her in a current which demanded that she float free and plunge into them.

“No,” she whispered. “No . . . no . . . no . . .”

She would have collapsed onto the path but for a bench beside her which accepted her sagging body. She tried to sit, could not, stretched out on the cold plasteel, still whispering denial.

The tide continued to rise within her.

She felt attuned to the slightest show of attention, aware of the risk, but alert for every exclamation from those guarded mouths which clamored within her. They were a cacophony of demand for her attention: “Me! Me!” “No, me!” And she knew that if she once gave her attention, gave it completely, she would be lost. To behold one face out of the multitude and follow the voice of that face would be to be held by the egocentrism which shared her existence.

“Prescience does this to you,” a voice whispered.

She covered her ears with her hands, thinking: I’m not prescient! The trance doesn’t work for me!

But the voice persisted: “It might work, if you had help.”

“No . . . no,” she whispered.

Other voices wove around her mind: “I, Agamemnon, your ancestor, demand audience!”

“No . . . no.” She pressed her hands against her ears until the flesh answered her with pain.

An insane cackle within her head asked: “What has become of Ovid? Simple. He’s John Bartlett’s ibid!”

The names were meaningless in her extremity. She wanted to scream against them and against all the other voices but could not find her own voice.

Her guard, sent back to the roof by senior attendants, peered once more from the doorway behind the mimosa, saw Alia on the bench, spoke to a companion: “Ahhh, she is resting. You noted that she didn’t sleep well last night. It is good for her to take the zaha, the morning siesta.”

Alia did not hear her guard. Her awareness was caught by shrieks of singing: “Merry old birds are we, hurrah!” the voices echoed against the inside of her skull and she thought: I’m going insane, I’m losing my mind.

Her feet made feeble fleeing motions against the bench. She felt that if she could only command her body to run, she might escape. She had to escape lest any part of that inner tide sweep her into silence, forever contaminating her soul. But her body would not obey. The mightiest forces in the Imperial universe would obey her slightest whim, but her body would not.

An inner voice chuckled. Then: “From one viewpoint, child, each incident of creation represents a catastrophe.” It was a basso voice which rumbled against her eyes, and again that chuckle as though deriding its own pontification. “My dear child, I will help you, but you must help me in return.”

Against the swelling background clamor behind that basso voice, Alia spoke through chattering teeth: “Who . . . who . . .”

A face formed itself upon her awareness. It was a smiling face of such fatness that it could have been a baby’s except for the glittering eagerness of the eyes. She tried to pull back, but achieved only a longer view which included the body attached to that face. The body was grossly, immensely fat, clothed in a robe which revealed by subtle bulges beneath it that this fat had required the support of portable suspensors.

“You see,” the basso voice rumbled, “it is only your maternal grandfather. You know me. I was the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.”

“You’re . . . you’re dead!” she gasped.

“But, of course, my dear! Most of us within you are dead. But none of the others are really willing to help you. They don’t understand you.”

“Go away,” she pleaded. “Oh, please go away.”

“But you need help, granddaughter,” the Baron’s voice argued.

How remarkable he looks, she thought, watching the projection of the Baron against her closed eyelids.

“I’m willing to help you,” the Baron wheedled. “The others in here would only fight to take over your entire consciousness. Any one of them would try to drive you out. But me . . . I want only a little corner of my own.”

Again the other lives within her lifted their clamor. The tide once more threatened to engulf her and she heard her mother’s voice screeching. And Alia thought: She’s not dead.

“Shut up!” the Baron commanded.

Alia felt her own desires reinforcing that command, making it felt throughout her awareness.