Dune Messiah (27 page)

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Authors: Frank Herbert

Tags: #Dune (Imaginary place), #Fantasy, #General, #Science Fiction, #Fiction

BOOK: Dune Messiah
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Paul climbed to his feet. He felt the stone burner die, silence beneath him. His body was wet with perspiration against the stillsuit’s slickness—too much for the suit to accommodate. The air he drew into his lungs carried the heat and sulfur stench of the burner.
As he looked at the troopers beginning to stand up around him, the mist on Paul’s eyes faded into darkness. He summoned up his oracular vision of these moments, then, turned and strode along the track that Time had carved for him, fitting himself into the vision so tightly that it could not escape. He felt himself grow aware of this place as a multitudinous possession, reality welded to prediction.
Moans and groans of his troopers arose all around him as the men realized their blindness.
“Hold fast!” Paul shouted. “Help is coming!” And, as the complaints persisted, he said: “This is Muad’dib! I command you to hold fast! Help comes!”
Silence.
Then, true to his vision, a nearby guardsman said: “Is it truly the Emperor? Which of you can see? Tell me.”
“None of us has eyes,” Paul said. “They have taken my eyes, as well, but not my vision. I can
see
you standing there, a dirty wall within touching distance on your left. Now wait bravely. Stilgar comes with our friends.”
The thwock-thwock of many ’thopters grew louder all around. There was the sound of hurrying feet. Paul
watched
his friends come, matching their sounds to his oracular vision.
“Stilgar!” Paul shouted, waving an arm. “Over here!”
“Thanks to Shai-hulud,” Stilgar cried, running up to Paul. “You’re not …” In the sudden silence, Paul’s vision showed him Stilgar staring with an expression of agony at the ruined eyes of his friend and Emperor. “Oh, m’Lord,” Stilgar groaned. “Usul … Usul … Usul …”
“What of the stone burner?” one of the newcomers shouted.
“It’s ended,” Paul said, raising his voice. He gestured. “Get up there now and rescue the ones who were closest to it. Put up barriers. Lively now!” He turned back to Stilgar.
“Do you
see
, m’Lord?” Stilgar asked, wonder in his tone. “How can you see?”
For answer, Paul put a finger out to touch Stilgar’s cheek above the stillsuit mouthcap, felt tears. “You need give no moisture to me, old friend,” Paul said. “I am not dead.”
“But your eyes!”
“They’ve blinded my body, but not my vision,” Paul said. “Ah, Stil, I live in an apocalyptic dream. My steps fit into it so precisely that I fear most of all I will grow bored reliving the thing so exactly.”
“Usul, I don’t, I don’t …”
“Don’t try to understand it. Accept it. I am in the world beyond this world here. For me, they are the same. I need no hand to guide me. I see every movement all around me. I see every expression of your face. I have no eyes, yet I see.”
Stilgar shook his head sharply. “Sire, we must conceal your affliction from—”
“We hide it from no man,” Paul said.
“But the law …”
“We live by the Atreides Law now, Stil. The Fremen Law that the blind should be abandoned in the desert applies only to the blind. I am not blind. I live in the cycle of being where the war of good and evil has its arena. We are at a turning point in the succession of ages and we have our parts to play.”
In a sudden stillness, Paul heard one of the wounded being led past him. “It was terrible,” the man groaned, “a great fury of fire.”
“None of these men shall be taken into the desert,” Paul said. “You hear me, Stil?”
“I hear you, m’Lord.”
“They are to be fitted with new eyes at my expense.”
“It will be done, m’Lord.”
Paul, hearing the awe grow in Stilgar’s voice, said: “I will be at the Command ’thopter. Take charge here.”
“Yes, m’Lord.”
Paul stepped around Stilgar, strode down the street. His vision told him every movement, every irregularity beneath his feet, every face he encountered. He gave orders as he moved, pointing to men of his personal entourage, calling out names, summoning to himself the ones who represented the intimate apparatus of government. He could feel the terror grow behind him, the fearful whispers.
“His eyes!”
“But he looked right at you, called you by name!”
At the Command ’thopter, he deactivated his personal shield, reached into the machine and took the microphone from the hand of a startled communications officer, issued a swift string of orders, thrust the microphone back into the officer’s hand. Turning, Paul summoned a weapons specialist, one of the eager and brilliant new breed who remembered sietch life only dimly.
“They used a stone burner,” Paul said.
After the briefest pause, the man said: “So I was told, Sire.”
“You know what that means, of course.”
“The fuel could only have been atomic.”
Paul nodded, thinking of how this man’s mind must be racing. Atomics. The Great Convention prohibited such weapons. Discovery of the perpetrator would bring down the combined retributive assault of the Great Houses. Old feuds would be forgotten, discarded in the face of this threat and the ancient fears it aroused.
“It cannot have been manufactured without leaving some traces,” Paul said. “You will assemble the proper equipment and search out the place where the stone burner was made.”
“At once, Sire.” With one last fearful glance, the man sped away.
“M’Lord,” the communications officer ventured from behind him. “Your eyes …”
Paul turned, reached into the ’thopter, returned the command set to his personal band. “Call Chani,” he ordered. “Tell her … tell her I am alive and will be with her soon.”
Now the forces gather,
Paul thought. And he noted how strong was the smell of fear in the perspiration all around.
He has gone from Alia,
The womb of heaven!
Holy, holy, holy!
Fire-sand leagues
Confront our Lord.
He can see
Without eyes!
A demon upon him!
Holy, holy, holy
Equation:
He solved for
Martyrdom!
 
—THE MOON FALLS DOWN SONGS OF MUAD’DIB
 
 
After seven days of radiating fevered activity, the Keep took on an unnatural quiet. On this morning, there were people about, but they spoke in whispers, heads close together, and they walked softly. Some scurried with an oddly furtive gait. The sight of a guard detail coming in from the forecourt drew questioning looks and frowns at the noise which the newcomers brought with their tramping about and stacking of weapons. The newcomers caught the mood of the interior, though, and began moving in that furtive way.
Talk of the stone burner still floated around: “He said the fire had blue-green in it and a smell out of hell.”
“Elpa is a fool! He says he’ll commit suicide rather than take Tleilaxu eyes.”
“I don’t like talk of eyes.”
“Muad’dib passed me and called me by name!”
“How does
He
see without eyes?”
“People are leaving, had you heard? There’s great fear. The Naibs say they’ll go to Sietch Makab for a Grand Council.”
“What’ve they done with the Panegyrist?”
“I saw them take him into the chamber where the Naibs are meeting. Imagine Korba a prisoner!”
Chani had arisen early, awakened by a stillness in the Keep. Awakening, she’d found Paul sitting beside her, his eyeless sockets aimed at some formless place beyond the far wall of their bedchamber. What the stone burner had done with its peculiar affinity for eye tissue, all that ruined flesh had been removed. Injections and unguents had saved the stronger flesh around the sockets, but she felt that the radiation had gone deeper.
Ravenous hunger seized her as she sat up. She fed on the food kept by the bedside—spicebread, a heavy cheese.
Paul gestured at the food. “Beloved, there was no way to spare you this. Believe me.”
Chani stilled a fit of trembling when he aimed those empty sockets at her. She’d given up asking him to explain. He spoke so oddly:
“I was baptized in sand and it cost me the knack of believing. Who trades in faiths anymore? Who’ll buy? Who’ll sell?”
What could he mean by such words?
He refused even to consider Tleilaxu eyes, although he bought them with a lavish hand for the men who’d shared his affliction.
Hunger satisfied, Chani slipped from bed, glanced back at Paul, noted his tiredness. Grim lines framed his mouth. The dark hair stood up, mussed from a sleep that hadn’t healed. He appeared so saturnine and remote. The back and forth of waking and sleeping did nothing to change this. She forced herself to turn away, whispered: “My love … my love …”
He leaned over, pulled her back into the bed, kissed her cheeks. “Soon we’ll go back to our desert,” he whispered. “Only a few things remain to be done here.”
She trembled at the finality in his voice.
He tightened his arms around her, murmured: “Don’t fear me, my Sihaya. Forget mystery and accept love. There’s no mystery about love. It comes from life. Can’t you feel that?”
“Yes.”
She put a palm against his chest, counting his heartbeats. His love cried out to the Fremen spirit in her—torrential, outpouring, savage. A magnetic power enveloped her.
“I promise you a thing, beloved,” he said. “A child of ours will rule such an empire that mine will fade in comparison. Such achievements of living and art and sublime—”
“We’re here now!” she protested, fighting a dry sob. “And … I feel we have so little … time.”
“We have eternity, beloved.”
“
You
may have eternity. I have only now.”
“But this
is
eternity.” He stroked her forehead.
She pressed against him, lips on his neck. The pressure agitated the life in her womb. She felt it stir.
Paul felt it, too. He put a hand on her abdomen, said: “Ahh, little ruler of the universe, wait your time. This moment is mine.”
She wondered then why he always spoke of the life within her as singular. Hadn’t the medics told him? She searched back in her own memory, curious that the subject had never arisen between them. Surely, he must know she carried twins. She hesitated on the point of raising this question. He
must
know. He knew everything. He knew all the things that were herself. His hands, his mouth—all of him knew her.
Presently, she said: “Yes, love. This is forever … this is real.” And she closed her eyes tightly lest sight of his dark sockets stretch her soul from paradise to hell. No matter the rihani magic in which he’d enciphered their lives, his flesh remained real, his caresses could not be denied.
When they arose to dress for the day, she said: “If the people only knew your love …”
But his mood had changed. “You can’t build politics on love,” he said. “People aren’t concerned with love; it’s too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos. We can’t have that, can we? And how do you make despotism lovable?”
“You’re not a despot!” she protested, tying her scarf. “Your laws are just.”
“Ahh, laws,” he said. He crossed to the window, pulled back the draperies as though he could look out. “What’s law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law—our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don’t look too closely at the law. Do, and you’ll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You’ll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.”
Chani’s mouth drew into a tight line. She couldn’t deny his wisdom and sagacity, but these moods frightened her. He turned upon himself and she sensed internal wars. It was as though he took the Fremen maxim,
“Never to forgive—never to forget,”
and whipped his own flesh with it.
She crossed to his side, stared past him at an angle. The growing heat of the day had begun pulling the north wind out of these protected latitudes. The wind painted a false sky full of ochre plumes and sheets of crystal, strange designs in rushing gold and red. High and cold, the wind broke against the Shield Wall with fountains of dust.
Paul felt Chani’s warmth beside him. Momentarily, he lowered a curtain of forgetfulness across his vision. He might just be standing here with his eyes closed. Time refused to stand still for him, though. He inhaled darkness—starless, tearless. His affliction dissolved substance until all that remained was astonishment at the way sounds condensed his universe. Everything around him leaned on his lonely sense of hearing, falling back only when he touched objects: the drapery, Chani’s hand … He caught himself listening for Chani’s breaths.
Where was the insecurity of things that were only probable? he asked himself. His mind carried such a burden of mutilated memories. For every instant of reality there existed countless projections, things fated never to be. An invisible self within him remembered the false pasts, their burden threatening at times to overwhelm the present.

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