Dune (Page 149)

This happened , Paul told himself. This was real, not born out of its time and subject to change .

Paul remembered he had rushed out to find Chani standing beneath the yellow globes of the corridor, clad in a brilliant blue wraparound robe with hood thrown back, a flush of exertion on her elfin features. She had been sheathing her crysknife. A huddled group had been hurrying away down the corridor with a burden.

And Paul remembered telling himself: You always know when they’re carrying a body.

Chani’s water rings, worn openly in sietch on a cord around her neck, tinkled as she turned toward him.

"Chani, what is this?" he asked.

"I dispatched one who came to challenge you in single combat, Usul."

"You killed him?"

"Yes. But perhaps I should’ve left him for Harah."

(And Paul recalled how the faces of the people around them had showed appreciation for these words. Even Harah had laughed.)

"But he came to challenge me! "

"You trained me yourself in the weirding way, Usul."

"Certainly! But you shouldn’t – "

"I was born in the desert, Usul. I know how to use a crysknife."

He suppressed his anger, tried to talk reasonably. "This may all be true, Chani, but – "

"I am no longer a child hunting scorpions in the sietch by the light of a handglobe, Usul. I do not play games."

Paul glared at her, caught by the odd ferocity beneath her casual attitude.

"He was not worthy, Usul," Chani said. "I’d not disturb your meditations with the likes of him." She moved closer, looking at him out of the corners of her eyes, dropping her voice so that only he might hear. "And, beloved, when it’s learned that a challenger may face me and be brought to shameful death by Muad’Dib’s woman, there’ll be fewer challengers."

Yes , Paul told himself, that had certainly happened. It was true-past. And the number of challengers testing the new blade of Muad’Dib did drop dramatically .

Somewhere, in a world not-of-the-dream, there was a hint of motion, the cry of a nightbird.

I dream , Paul reassured himself. It’s the spice meal .

Still, there was about him a feeling of abandonment. He wondered it if might be possible that his ruh-spirit had slipped over somehow into the world where the Fremen believed he had his true existence – into the alam al-mithal, the world of similitudes, that metaphysical realm where all physical limitations were removed. And he knew fear at the thought of such a place, because removal of all limitations meant removal of all points of reference. In the landscape of a myth he could not orient himself and say: "I am I because I am here."

His mother had said once: "The people are divided, some of them, in how they think of you."

I must be waking from the dream , Paul told himself. For this had happened – these words from his mother, the Lady Jessica who was now a Reverend Mother of the Fremen, these words had passed through reality.

Jessica was fearful of the religious relationship between himself and the Fremen, Paul knew. She didn’t like the fact that people of both sietch and graben referred to Muad’Dib as Him . And she went questioning among the tribes, sending out her Sayyadina spies, collecting their answers and brooding on them.

She had quoted a Bene Gesserit proverb to him: "When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement become headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late."

Paul recalled that he had sat there in his mother’s quarters, in the inner chamber shrouded by dark hangings with their surfaces covered by woven patterns out of Fremen mythology. He had sat there, hearing her out, noting the way she was always observing – even when her eyes were lowered. Her oval face had new lines in it at the corners of the mouth, but the hair was still like polished bronze. The wide-set green eyes, though, hid beneath their over-casting of spice-imbued blue.

"The Fremen have a simple, practical religion," he said.

"Nothing about religion is simple," she warned.

But Paul, seeing the clouded future that still hung over them, found himself swayed by anger. He could only say: "Religion unifies our forces. It’s our mystique."

"You deliberately cultivate this air, this bravura," she charged. "You never cease indoctrinating."

"Thus you yourself taught me," he said.

But she had been full of contentions and arguments that day. It had been the day of the circumcision ceremony for little Leto. Paul had understood some of the reasons for her upset. She had never accepted his liaison – the "marriage of youth" – with Chani. But Chani had produced an Atreides son, and Jessica had found herself unable to reject the child with the mother.

Jessica had stirred finally under his stare, said: "You think me an unnatural mother."

"Of course not."

"I see the way you watch me when I’m with your sister. You don’t understand about your sister."

"I know why Alia is different," he said. "She was unborn, part of you, when you changed the Water of Life. She – "

"You know nothing of it!"

And Paul, suddenly unable to express the knowledge gained out of its time, said only: "I don’t think you unnatural."

She saw his distress, said: "There is a thing, Son."

"Yes?"

"I do love your Chani. I accept her."

This was real, Paul told himself. This wasn’t the imperfect vision to be changed by the twistings out of time’s own birth.

The reassurance gave him a new hold on his world. Bits of solid reality began to dip through the dream state into his awareness. He knew suddenly that he was in a hiereg, a desert camp. Chani had planted their stilltent on flour-sand for its softness. That could only mean Chani was near by – Chani, his soul, Chani his Sihaya, sweet as the desert spring, Chani up from the palmaries of the deep south.