“Lisan al-Gaib,” the woman whispered. Her eyes held awe as she turned them back toward Paul.
The legend again , Paul thought.
“Perhaps,” Stilgar said. “It hasn’t been tested, though.” He returned his attention to Paul. “Usul, it’s our way that you’ve now the responsibility for Jamis’ woman here and for his two sons. His yali . . . his quarters, are yours. His coffee service is yours . . . and this, his woman.”
Paul studied the woman, wondering: Why isn’t she mourning her man? Why does she show no hate for me? Abruptly, he saw that the Fremen were staring at him, waiting.
Someone whispered: “There’s work to do. Say how you accept her.”
Stilgar said: “Do you accept Harah as woman or servant?”
Harah lifted her arms, turning slowly on one heel. “I am still young, Usul. It’s said I still look as young as when I was with Geoff . . . before Jamis bested him.”
Jamis killed another to win her , Paul thought.
Paul said: “If I accept her as servant, may I yet change my mind at a later time?”
“You’d have a year to change your decision,” Stilgar said. “After that, she’s a free woman to choose as she wishes . . . or you could free her to choose for herself at any time. But she’s your responsibility, no matter what, for one year . . . and you’ll always share some responsibility for the sons of Jamis.”
“I accept her as servant,” Paul said.
Stilgar looked at Paul, said: “Caution’s a worthy trait in a man who’d lead.”
“But I’m young!” Harah repeated.
“Be silent,” Stilgar commanded. “If a thing has merit, it’ll be. Show Usul to his quarters and see he has fresh clothing and a place to rest.”
“Oh-h-h-h!” she said.
Paul had registered enough of her to have a first approximation. He felt the impatience of the troop, knew many things were being delayed here. He wondered if he dared ask the whereabouts of his mother and Chani, saw from Stilgar’s nervous stance that it would be a mistake.
He faced Harah, pitched his voice with tone and tremolo to accent her fear and awe, said: “Show me my quarters, Harah! We will discuss your youth another time.”
She backed away two steps, cast a frightened glance at Stilgar. “He has the weirding voice,” she husked.
“Stilgar,” Paul said. “Chani’s father put heavy obligation on me. If there’s anything . . . ”
“It’ll be decided in council,” Stilgar said. “You can speak then.” He nodded in dismissal, turned away with the rest of the troop following him.
Paul took Harah’s arm, noting how cool her flesh seemed, feeling her tremble. “I’ll not harm you, Harah,” he said. “Show me our quarters.” And he smoothed his voice with relaxants.
“You’ll not cast me out when the year’s gone?” she said. “I know for true I’m not as young as once I was.”
“As long as I live you’ll have a place with me,” he said. He released her arm. “Come now, where are our quarters?”
She turned, led the way down the passage, turning right into a wide cross tunnel lighted by evenly spaced yellow overhead globes. The stone floor was smooth, swept clean of sand.
Paul moved up beside her, studied the aquiline profile as they walked. “You do not hate me, Harah?”
“Why should I hate you?”
She nodded to a cluster of children who stared at them from the raised ledge of a side passage. Paul glimpsed adult shapes behind the children partly hidden by filmy hangings.
“I . . . bested Jamis.”
“Stilgar said the ceremony was held and you’re a friend of Jamis.” She glanced sidelong at him. “Stilgar said you gave moisture to the dead. Is that truth?”
“Yes.”
“It’s more than I’ll do . . . can do.”
“Don’t you mourn him?”
“In the time of mourning, I’ll mourn him.”
They passed an arched opening. Paul looked through it at men and women working with stand-mounted machinery in a large, bright chamber. There seemed an extra tempo of urgency to them.
“What’re they doing in there?” Paul asked.
She glanced back as they passed beyond the arch, said: “They hurry to finish the quota in the plastics shop before we flee. We need many dew collectors for the planting.”
“Flee?”
“Until the butchers stop hunting us or are driven from our land.”
Paul caught himself in a stumble, sensing an arrested instant of time, remembering a fragment, a visual projection of prescience – but it was displaced, like a montage in motion. The bits of his prescient memory were not quite as he remembered them.
“The Sardaukar hunt us,” he said.
“They’ll not find much excepting an empty sietch or two,” she said. “And they’ll find their share of death in the sand.”
“They’ll find this place?” he asked.
“Likely.”
“Yet we take the time to . . . ” He motioned with his head toward the arch now far behind them. ” . . . make . . . dew collectors?”
“The planting goes on.”
“What’re dew collectors?” he asked.
The glance she turned on him was full of surprise. “Don’t they teach you anything in the . . . wherever it is you come from?”
“Not about dew collectors.”
“Hai!” she said, and there was a whole conversation in the one word.
“Well, what are they?”
“Each bush, each weed you see out there in the erg,” she said, “how do you suppose it lives when we leave it? Each is planted most tenderly in its own little pit. The pits are filled with smooth ovals of chromoplastic. Light turns them white. You can see them glistening in the dawn if you look down from a high place. White reflects. But when Old Father Sun departs, the chromoplastic reverts to transparency in the dark. It cools with extreme rapidity. The surface condenses moisture out of the air. That moisture trickles down to keep our plants alive.”
“Dew collectors,” he muttered, enchanted by the simple beauty of such a scheme.
“I’ll mourn Jamis in the proper time for it,” she said, as though her mind had not left his other question. “He was a good man, Jamis, but quick to anger. A good provider, Jamis, and a wonder with the children. He made no separation between Geoff’s boy, my firstborn, and his own true son. They were equal in his eyes.” She turned a questing stare on Paul. “Would it be that way with you, Usul?”
“We don’t have that problem.”
“But if – ”
“Harah!”
She recoiled at the harsh edge in his voice.
They passed another brightly lighted room visible through an arch on their left. “What’s made there?” he asked.
“They repair the weaving machinery,” she said. “But it must be dismantled by tonight.” She gestured at a tunnel branching to their left. “Through there and beyond, that’s food processing and stillsuit maintenance.” She looked at Paul. “Your suit looks new. But if it needs work, I’m good with suits. I work in the factory in season.”
They began coming on knots of people now and thicker clusterings of openings in the tunnel’s sides. A file of men and women passed them carrying packs that gurgled heavily, the smell of spice strong about them.
“They’ll not get our water,” Harah said. “Or our spice. You can be sure of that.”
Paul glanced at the openings in the tunnel walls, seeing the heavy carpets on the raised ledge, glimpses of rooms with bright fabrics on the walls, piled cushions. People in the openings fell silent at their approach, followed Paul with untamed stares.
“The people find it strange you bested Jamis,” Harah said. “Likely you’ll have some proving to do when we’re settled in a new sietch.”
“I don’t like killing,” he said.
“Thus Stilgar tells it,” she said, but her voice betrayed her disbelief.
A shrill chanting grew louder ahead of them. They came to another side opening wider than any of the others Paul had seen. He slowed his pace, staring in at a room crowded with children sitting cross-legged on a maroon-carpeted floor.
At a chalkboard against the far wall stood a woman in a yellow wraparound, a projecto-stylus in one hand. The board was filled with designs – circles, wedges and curves, snake tracks and squares, flowing arcs split by parallel lines. The woman pointed to the designs one after the other as fast as she could move the stylus, and the children chanted in rhythm with her moving hand.
Paul listened, hearing the voices grow dimmer behind as he moved deeper into the sietch with Harah.
“Tree,” the children chanted. “Tree, grass, dune, wind, mountain, hill, fire, lightning, rock, rocks, dust, sand, heat, shelter, heat, full, winter, cold, empty, erosion, summer, cavern, day, tension, moon, night, caprock, sandtide, slope, planting, binder . . . ”
“You conduct classes at a time like this?” Paul asked.
Her face went somber and grief edged her voice: “What Liet taught us, we cannot pause an instant in that. Liet who is dead must not be forgotten. It’s the Chakobsa way.”
She crossed the tunnel to the left, stepped up onto a ledge, parted gauzy orange hangings and stood aside: “Your yali is ready for you, Usul.”
Paul hesitated before joining her on the ledge. He felt a sudden reluctance to be alone with this woman. It came to him that he was surrounded by a way of life that could only be understood by postulating an ecology of ideas and values. He felt that this Fremen world was fishing for him, trying to snare him in its ways. And he knew what lay in that snare – the wild jihad, the religious war he felt he should avoid at any cost.
“This is your yali,” Harah said. “Why do you hesitate?”
Paul nodded, joined her on the ledge. He lifted the hangings across from her, feeling metal fibers in the fabric, followed her into a short entrance way and then into a larger room, square, about six meters to a side – thick blue carpets on the floor, blue and green fabrics hiding the rock walls, glowglobes tuned to yellow overhead bobbing against draped yellow ceiling fabrics.
The effect was that of an ancient tent.
Harah stood in front of him, left hand on hip, her eyes studying his face. “The children are with a friend,” she said. “They will present themselves later.”
Paul masked his unease beneath a quick scanning of the room. Thin hangings to the right, he saw, partly concealed a larger room with cushions piled around the walls. He felt a soft breeze from an air duct, saw the outlet cunningly hidden in a pattern of hangings directly ahead of him.
“Do you wish me to help you remove your stillsuit?” Harah asked.
“No . . . thank you.”
“Shall I bring food?”
“Yes.”
“There is a reclamation chamber off the other room.” She gestured. “For your comfort and convenience when you’re out of your stillsuit.”
“You said we have to leave this sietch,” Paul said. “Shouldn’t we be packing or something?”
“It will be done in its time,” she said. “The butchers have yet to penetrate to our region.”
Still she hesitated, staring at him.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“You’ve not the eyes of the Ibad,” she said. “It’s strange but not entirely unattractive.”
“Get the food,” he said. “I’m hungry.”
She smiled at him – a knowing, woman’s smile that he found disquieting. “I am your servant,” she said, and whirled away in one lithe motion, ducking behind a heavy wall hanging that revealed another passage before falling back into place.
Feeling angry with himself, Paul brushed through the thin hanging on the right and into the larger room. He stood there a moment caught by uncertainty. And he wondered where Chani was . . . Chani who had just lost her father.
We’re alike in that , he thought.
A wailing cry sounded from the outer corridors, its volume muffled by the intervening hangings. It was repeated, a bit more distant. And again. Paul realized someone was calling the time. He focused on the fact that he had seen no clocks.
The faint smell of burning creosote bush came to his nostrils, riding on the omnipresent stink of the sietch. Paul saw that he had already suppressed the odorous assault on his senses.
And he wondered again about his mother, how the moving montage of the future would incorporate her . . . and the daughter she bore. Mutable time-awareness danced around him. He shook his head sharply, focusing his attention on the evidences that spoke of profound depth and breadth in this Fremen culture that had swallowed them.
With its subtle oddities.
He had seen a thing about the caverns and this room, a thing that suggested far greater differences than anything he had yet encountered.
There was no sign of a poison snooper here, no indication of their use anywhere in the cave warren. Yet he could smell poisons in the sietch stench – strong ones, common ones.
He heard a rustle of hangings, thought it was Harah returning with food, and turned to watch her. Instead, from beneath a displaced pattern of hangings, he saw two young boys – perhaps aged nine and ten – staring out at him with greedy eyes. Each wore a small kindjal-type of crysknife, rested a hand on the hilt.
And Paul recalled the stories of the Fremen – that their children fought as ferociously as the adults.
The hands move, the lips moveย ย –
Ideas gush from his words,
And his eyes devour!
He is an island of Selfdom .
– description from “A Manual of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
Phosphortubes in the faraway upper reaches of the cavern cast a dim light onto the thronged interior, hinting at the great size of this rock-enclosed space . . . larger, Jessica saw, than even the Gathering Hall of her Bene Gesserit school. She estimated there were more than five thousand people gathered out there beneath the ledge where she stood with Stilgar.
And more were coming.
The air was murmurous with people.
“Your son has been summoned from his rest, Sayyadina,” Stilgar said. “Do you wish him to share in your decision?”
“Could he change my decision?”
“Certainly, the air with which you speak comes from your own lungs, but – ”
“The decision stands,” she said.
But she felt misgivings, wondering if she should use Paul as an excuse for backing out of a dangerous course. There was an unborn daughter to think of as well. What endangered the flesh of the mother endangered the flesh of the daughter.
Men came with rolled carpets, grunting under the weight of them, stirring up dust as the loads were dropped onto the ledge.
Stilgar took her arm, led her back into the acoustical horn that formed the rear limits of the ledge. He indicated a rock bench within the horn. “The Reverend Mother will sit here, but you may rest yourself until she comes.”
“I prefer to stand,” Jessica said.
She watched the men unroll the carpets, covering the ledge, looked out at the crowd. There were at least ten thousand people on the rock floor now.
And still they came.
Out on the desert, she knew, it already was red nightfall, but here in the cavern hall was perpetual twilight, a gray vastness thronged with people come to see her risk her life.
A way was opened through the crowd to her right, and she saw Paul approaching flanked by two small boys. There was a swaggering air of self-importance about the children. They kept hands on knives, scowled at the wall of people on either side.
“The sons of Jamis who are now the sons of Usul,” Stilgar said. “They take their escort duties seriously.” He ventured a smile at Jessica.
Jessica recognized the effort to lighten her mood and was grateful for it, but could not take her mind from the danger that confronted her.
I had no choice but to do this , she thought. We must move swiftly if we’re to secure our place among these Fremen .
Paul climbed to the ledge, leaving the children below. He stopped in front of his mother, glanced at Stilgar, back to Jessica. “What is happening? I thought I was being summoned to council.”
Stilgar raised a hand for silence, gestured to his left where another way had been opened in the throng. Chani came down the lane opened there, her elfin face set in lines of grief. She had removed her stillsuit and wore a graceful blue wraparound that exposed her thin arms. Near the shoulder on her left arm, a green kerchief had been tied.
Green for mourning , Paul thought.
It was one of the customs the two sons of Jamis had explained to him by indirection, telling him they wore no green because they accepted him as guardian-father.
“Are you the Lisan al-Gaib?” they had asked. And Paul had sensed the jihad in their words, shrugged off the question with one of his own – learning then that Kaleff, the elder of the two, was ten, and the natural son of Geoff. Orlop, the younger, was eight, the natural son of Jamis.
It had been a strange day with these two standing guard over him because he asked it, keeping away the curious, allowing him the time to nurse his thoughts and prescient memories, to plan a way to prevent the jihad.
Now, standing beside his mother on the cavern ledge and looking out at the throng, he wondered if any plan could prevent the wild outpouring of fanatic legions.
Chani, nearing the ledge, was followed at a distance by four women carrying another woman in a litter.
Jessica ignored Chani’s approach, focusing all her attention on the woman in the litter – a crone, a wrinkled and shriveled ancient thing in a black gown with hood thrown back to reveal the tight knot of gray hair and the stringy neck.
The litter-carriers deposited their burden gently on the ledge from below, and Chani helped the old woman to her feet.
So this is their Reverend Mother , Jessica thought.
The old woman leaned heavily on Chani as she hobbled toward Jessica, looking like a collection of sticks draped in the black robe. She stopped in front of Jessica, peered upward for a long moment before speaking in a husky whisper.
“So you’re the one.” The old head nodded once precariously on the thin neck. “The Shadout Mapes was right to pity you.”
Jessica spoke quickly, scornfully: “I need no one’s pity.”
“That remains to be seen,” husked the old woman. She turned with surprising quickness and faced the throng. “Tell them, Stilgar.”
“Must I?” he asked.
“We are the people of Misr,” the old woman rasped. “Since our Sunni ancestors fled from Nilotic al-Ourouba, we have known flight and death. The young go on that our people shall not die.”
Stilgar took a deep breath, stepped forward two paces.
Jessica felt the hush come over the crowded cavern – some twenty thousand people now, standing silently, almost without movement. It made her feel suddenly small and filled with caution.
“Tonight we must leave this sietch that has sheltered us for so long and go south into the desert,” Stilgar said. His voice boomed out across the uplifted faces, reverberating with the force given it by the acoustical horn behind the ledge.
Still the throng remained silent.
“The Reverend Mother tells me she cannot survive another hajra,” Stilgar said. “We have lived before without a Reverend Mother, but it is not good for people to seek a new home in such straits.”
Now, the throng stirred, rippling with whispers and currents of disquiet.
“That this may not come to pass,” Stilgar said, “our new Sayyadina Jessica of the Weirding, has consented to enter the rite at this time. She will attempt to pass within that we not lose the strength of our Reverend Mother.”
Jessica of the Weirding , Jessica thought. She saw Paul staring at her, his eyes filled with questions, but his mouth held silent by all the strangeness around them.
If I die in the attempt, what will become of him? Jessica asked herself. Again she felt the misgivings fill her mind.
Chani led the old Reverend Mother to a rock bench deep in the acoustical horn, returned to stand beside Stilgar.
“That we may not lose all if Jessica of the Weirding should fail,” Stilgar said, “Chani, daughter of Liet, will be consecrated in the Sayyadina at this time.” He stepped one pace to the side.
From deep in the acoustical horn, the old woman’s voice came out to them, an amplified whisper, harsh and penetrating: “Chani has returned from her hajra – Chani has seen the waters.”
A sussurant response arose from the crowd: “She has seen the waters.”
“I consecrate the daughter of Liet in the Sayyadina,” husked the old woman.
“She is accepted,” the crowd responded.
Paul barely heard the ceremony, his attention still centered on what had been said of his mother.
If she should fail?
He turned and looked back at the one they called Reverend Mother, studying the dried crone features, the fathomless blue fixation of her eyes. She looked as though a breeze would blow her away, yet there was that about her which suggested she might stand untouched in the path of a coriolis storm. She carried the same aura of power that he remembered from the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam who had tested him with agony in the way of the gom jabbar.
“I, the Reverend Mother Ramallo, whose voice speaks as a multitude, say this to you,” the old woman said. “It is fitting that Chani enter the Sayyadina.”
“It is fitting,” the crowd responded.
The old woman nodded, whispered: “I give her the silver skies, the golden desert and its shining rocks, the green fields that will be. I give these to Sayyadina Chani. And lest she forget that she’s servant of us all, to her fall the menial tasks in this Ceremony of the Seed. Let it be as Shai-hulud will have it.” She lifted a brown-stick arm, dropped it.
Jessica, feeling the ceremony close around her with a current that swept her beyond all turning back, glanced once at Paul’s question filled face, then prepared herself for the ordeal.
“Let the watermasters come forward,” Chani said with only the slightest quaver of uncertainty in her girl-child voice.
Now, Jessica felt herself at the focus of danger, knowing its presence in the watchfulness of the throng, in the silence.
A band of men made its way through a serpentine path opened in the crowd, moving up from the back in pairs. Each pair carried a small skin sack, perhaps twice the size of a human head. The sacks sloshed heavily.
The two leaders deposited their load at Chani’s feet on the ledge and stepped back.
Jessica looked at the sack, then at the men. They had their hoods thrown back, exposing long hair tied in a roll at the base of the neck. The black pits of their eyes stared back at her without wavering.
A furry redolence of cinnamon arose from the sack, wafted across Jessica. The spice? she wondered.
“Is there water?” Chani asked.
The watermaster on the left, a man with a purple scar line across the bridge of his nose, nodded once. “There is water, Sayyadina,” he said, “but we cannot drink of it.”
“Is there seed?” Chani asked.
“There is seed,” the man said.
Chani knelt and put her hands to the sloshing sack. “Blessed is the water and its seed.”
There was familiarity to the rite, and Jessica looked back at the Reverend Mother Ramallo. The old woman’s eyes were closed and she sat hunched over as though asleep.
“Sayyadina Jessica,” Chani said.
Jessica turned to see the girl staring up at her.
“Have you tasted the blessed water?” Chani asked.
Before Jessica could answer, Chani said: “It is not possible that you have tasted the blessed water. You are outworlder and unprivileged.”
A sigh passed through the crowd, a sussuration of robes that made the nape hairs creep on Jessica’s neck.
“The crop was large and the maker has been destroyed,” Chani said. She began unfastening a coiled spout fixed to the top of the sloshing sack.
Now, Jessica felt the sense of danger boiling around her. She glanced at Paul, saw that he was caught up in the mystery of the ritual and had eyes only for Chani.
Has he seen this moment in time? Jessica wondered. She rested a hand on her abdomen, thinking of the unborn daughter there, asking herself: Do I have the right to risk us both?
Chani lifted the spout toward Jessica, said: “Here is the Water of Life, the water that is greater than water –ย ย Kan , the water that frees the soul. If you be a Reverend Mother, it opens the universe to you. Let Shai-hulud judge now.”
Jessica felt herself torn between duty to her unborn child and duty to Paul. For Paul, she knew, she should take that spout and drink of the sack’s contents, but as she bent to the proffered spout, her senses told her its peril.
The stuff in the sack had a bitter smell subtly akin to many poisons that she knew, but unlike them, too.
“You must drink it now,” Chani said.
There’s no turning back , Jessica reminded herself. But nothing in all her Bene Gesserit training came into her mind to help her through this instant.
What is it? Jessica asked, herself. Liquor? A drug?
She bent over the spout, smelled the esters of cinnamon, remembering then the drunkenness of Duncan Idaho. Spice liquor? she asked herself. She took the siphon tube in her mouth, pulled up only the most minuscule sip. It tasted of the spice, a faint bite acrid on the tongue.
Chani pressed down on the skin bag. A great gulp of the stuff surged into Jessica’s mouth and before she could help herself, she swallowed it, fighting to retain her calmness and dignity.
“To accept a little death is worse than death itself,” Chani said. She stared at Jessica, waiting.
And Jessica stared back, still holding the spout in her mouth. She tasted the sack’s contents in her nostrils, in the roof of her mouth, in her cheeks, in her eyes – a biting sweetness, now.
Cool .
Again, Chani sent the liquid gushing into Jessica’s mouth.
Delicate.
Jessica studied Chani’s face – elfin features – seeing the traces of Liet-Kynes there as yet unfixed by time.
This is a drug they feed me , Jessica told herself.
But it was unlike any other drug of her experience, and Bene Gesserit training included the taste of many drugs.
Chani’s features were so clear, as though outlined in light.
A drug .
Whirling silence settled around Jessica. Every fiber of her body accepted the fact that something profound had happened to it. She felt that she was a conscious mote, smaller than any subatomic particle, yet capable of motion and of sensing her surroundings. Like an abrupt revelation – the curtains whipped away – she realized she had become aware of a psychokinesthetic extension of herself. She was the mote, yet not the mote.
The cavern remained around her – the people. She sensed them: Paul, Chani, Stilgar, the Reverend Mother Ramallo.
Reverend Mother!
At the school there had been rumors that some did not survive the Reverend Mother ordeal, that the drug took them.
Jessica focused her attention on the Reverend Mother Ramallo, aware now that all this was happening in a frozen instant of time – suspended time for her alone.
Why is time suspended? she asked herself. She stared at the frozen expressions around her, seeing a dust mote above Chani’s head, stopped there.
Waiting.
The answer to this instant came like an explosion in her consciousness: her personal time was suspended to save her life.
She focused on the psychokinesthetic extension of herself, looking within, and was confronted immediately with a cellular core, a pit of blackness from which she recoiled.
That is the place where we cannot look , she thought. There is the place the Reverend Mothers are so reluctant to mention – the place where only a Kwisatz Haderach may look .
This realization returned a small measure of confidence, and again she ventured to focus on the psychokinesthetic extension, becoming a mote-self that searched within her for danger.
She found it within the drug she had swallowed.
The stuff was dancing particles within her, its motions so rapid that even frozen time could not stop them. Dancing particles. She began recognizing familiar structures, atomic linkages: a carbon atom here, helical wavering . . . a glucose molecule. An entire chain of molecules confronted her, and she recognized a protein . . . a methyl-protein configuration.
Ah-h-h!
It was a soundless mental sigh within her as she saw the nature of the poison.
With her psychokinesthetic probing, she moved into it, shifted an oxygen mote, allowed another carbon mote to link, reattached a linkage of oxygen . . . hydrogen.
The change spread . . . faster and faster as the catalyzed reaction opened its surface of contact.
The suspension of time relaxed its hold upon her, and she sensed motion. The tube spout from the sack was touched to her mouth – gently, collecting a drop of moisture.
Chani’s taking the catalyst from my body to change the poison in that sack , Jessica thought. Why?
Someone eased her to a sitting position. She saw the old Reverend Mother Ramallo being brought to sit beside her on the carpeted ledge. A dry hand touched her neck.
And there was another psychokinesthetic mote within her awareness! Jessica tried to reject it, but the mote swept closer . . . closer.
They touched!
It was like an ultimate simpatico, being two people at once: not telepathy, but mutual awareness.
With the old Reverend Mother!
But Jessica saw that the Reverend Mother didn’t think of herself as old. An image unfolded before the mutual mind’s eye: a young girl with a dancing spirit and tender humor.
Within the mutual awareness, the young girl said, “Yes, that is how I am.”
Jessica could only accept the words, not respond to them.
“You’ll have it all soon, Jessica,” the inward image said.
This is hallucination , Jessica told herself.
“You know better than that,” the inward image said. “Swiftly now, do not fight me. There isn’t much time. We . . . ” There came a long pause, then; “You should’ve told us you were pregnant!”
Jessica found the voice that talked within the mutual awareness. “Why?”
“This changes both of you! Holy Mother, what have we done?”
Jessica sensed a forced shift in the mutual awareness, saw another mote-presence with the inward eye. The other mote darted wildly here, there, circling. It radiated pure terror.
“You’ll have to be strong,” the old Reverend Mother’s image-presence said. “Be thankful it’s a daughter you carry. This would’ve killed a male fetus. Now . . . carefully, gently . . . touch your daughter-presence. Be your daughter-presence. Absorb the fear . . . soothe . . . use your courage and your strength . . . gently now . . . gently . . . ”
The other whirling mote swept near, and Jessica compelled herself to touch it.
Terror threatened to overwhelm her.
She fought it the only way she knew: “I shall not fear. Fear is the mind killer ๏ฟฝC”
The litany brought a semblance of calm. The other mote lay quiescent against her.
Words won’t work , Jessica told herself.
She reduced herself to basic emotional reactions, radiated love, comfort, a warm snuggling of protection.
The terror receded.
Again, the presence of the old Reverend Mother asserted itself, but now there was a tripling of mutual awareness – two active and one that lay quietly absorbing.
“Time compels me,” the Reverend Mother said within the awareness. “I have much to give you. And I do not know if your daughter can accept all this while remaining sane. But it must be: the needs of the tribe are paramount.”
“What – ”
“Remain silent and accept!”
Experiences began to unroll before Jessica. It was like a lecture strip in a subliminal training projector at the Bene Gesserit school . . . but faster . . . blindingly faster.
Yet . . . distinct.
She knew each experience as it happened: there was a lover – virile, bearded, with the Fremen eyes, and Jessica saw his strength and tenderness, all of him in one blink-moment, through the Reverend Mother’s memory.
There was no time now to think of what this might be doing to the daughter fetus, only time to accept and record. The experiences poured in on Jessica – birth, life, death – important matters and unimportant, an outpouring of single-view time.
Why should a fall of sand from a clifftop stick in the memory? she asked herself.
Too late, Jessica saw what was happening: the old woman was dying and, in dying, pouring her experiences into Jessica’s awareness as water is poured into a cup. The other mote faded back into pre-birth awareness as Jessica watched it. And, dying-in-conception, the old Reverend Mother left her life in Jessica’s memory with one last sighing blur of words.
“I’ve been a long time waiting for you,” she said. “Here is my life.”
There it was, encapsuled, all of it.
Even the moment of death.
I am now a Reverend Mother , Jessica realized.
And she knew with a generalized awareness that she had become, in truth, precisely what was meant by a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. The poison drug had transformed her.
This wasn’t exactly how they did it at the Bene Gesserit school, she knew. No one had ever introduced her to the mysteries of it, but she knew.
The end result was the same.
Jessica sensed the daughter-mote still touching her inner awareness, probed it without response.
A terrible sense of loneliness crept through Jessica in the realization of what had happened to her. She saw her own life as a pattern that had slowed and all life around her speeded up so that the dancing interplay became clearer.
The sensation of mote-awareness faded slightly, its intensity easing as her body relaxed from the threat of the poison, but still she felt that other mote, touching it with a sense of guilt at what she had allowed to happen to it.
I did it, my poor, unformed, dear little daughter, I brought you into this universe and exposed your awareness to all its varieties without any defenses .
