Dune (Page 23)

"As you will, my Lady," Mapes said.

Jessica turned away, thinking: Hawat may have passed this residency as safe, but there’s something wrong about the place. I can feel it .

An urgent need to see her son gripped Jessica. She began walking toward the arched doorway that led into the passage to the dining hall and the family wings. Faster and faster she walked until she was almost running.

Behind her, Mapes paused in clearing the wrappings from the bull’s head, looked at the retreating back. "She’s the One all right," she muttered. "Poor thing."

"Yueh! Yueh! Yueh!" goes the refrain. "A million deaths were not enough for Yueh!"

– from "A Child’s History of Muad’Dib" by the Princess Irulan

The door stood ajar, and Jessica stepped through it into a room with yellow walls. To her left stretched a low settee of black hide and two empty bookcases, a hanging waterflask with dust on its bulging sides. To her right, bracketing another door, stood more empty bookcases, a desk from Caladan and three chairs. At the windows directly ahead of her stood Dr. Yueh, his back to her, his attention fixed upon the outside world.

Jessica took another silent step into the room.

She saw that Yueh’s coat was wrinkled, a white smudge near the left elbow as though he had leaned against chalk. He looked, from behind, like a fleshless stick figure in overlarge black clothing, a caricature poised for stringy movement at the direction of a puppet master. Only the squarish block of head with long ebony hair caught in its silver Suk School ring at the shoulder seemed alive – turning slightly to follow some movement outside.

Again, she glanced around the room, seeing no sign of her son, but the closed door on her right, she knew, let into a small bedroom for which Paul had expressed a liking.

"Good afternoon. Dr. Yueh," she said. "Where’s Paul?"

He nodded as though to something out the window, spoke in an absent manner without turning: "Your son grew tired, Jessica. I sent him into the next room to rest."

Abruptly, he stiffened, whirled with mustache flopping over his purpled lips. "Forgive me, my Lady! My thoughts were far away . . . I . . . did not mean to be familiar."

She smiled, held out her right hand. For a moment, she was afraid he might kneel. " Wellington , please."

"To use your name like that . . . I . . . "

"We’ve known each other six years," she said. "It’s long past time formalities should’ve been dropped between us – in private."

Yueh ventured a thin smile, thinking: I believe it has worked. Now, she’ll think anything unusual in my manner is due to embarrassment. She’ll not look for deeper reasons when she believes she already knows the answer .

"I’m afraid I was woolgathering," he said. "Whenever I . . . feel especially sorry for you. I’m afraid I think of you as . . . well, Jessica."

"Sorry for me? Whatever for?"

Yueh shrugged. Long ago, he had realized Jessica was not gifted with the full Truthsay as his Wanna had been. Still, he always used the truth with Jessica whenever possible. It was safest.

"You’ve seen this place, my . . . Jessica." He stumbled over the name, plunged ahead: "So barren after Caladan. And the people! Those townswomen we passed on the way here wailing beneath their veils. The way they looked at us."

She folded her arms across her breast, hugging herself, feeling the crysknife there, a blade ground from a sandworm’s tooth, if the reports were right. "It’s just that we’re strange to them – different people, different customs. They’ve known only the Harkonnens." She looked past him out the windows. "What were you staring at out there?"

He turned back to the window. "The people."

Jessica crossed to his side, looked to the left toward the front of the house where Yueh’s attention was focused. A line of twenty palm trees grew there, the ground beneath them swept clean, barren. A screen fence separated them from the road upon which robed people were passing. Jessica detected a faint shimmering in the air between her and the people – a house shield – and went on to study the passing throng, wondering why Yueh found them so absorbing.

The pattern emerged and she put a hand to her cheek. The way the passing people looked at the palm trees! She saw envy, some hate . . . even a sense of hope. Each person raked those trees with a fixity of expression.

"Do you know what they’re thinking?" Yueh asked.

"You profess to read minds?" she asked.

"Those minds," he said. "They look at those trees and they think; ‘There are one hundred of us.’ That’s what they think."

She turned a puzzled frown on him. "Why?"

"Those are date palms," he said. "One date palm requires forty liters of water a day. A man requires but eight liters. A palm, then, equals five men. There are twenty palms out there – one hundred men."

"But some of those people look at the trees hopefully."

"They but hope some dates will fall, except it’s the wrong season."

"We look at this place with too critical an eye," she said. "There’s hope as well as danger here. The spice could make us rich. With a fat treasury, we can make this world into whatever we wish."

And she laughed silently at herself: Who am I trying to convince? The laugh broke through her restraints, emerging brittle, without humor. "But you can’t buy security," she said.

Yueh turned away to hide his face from her. If only it were possible to hate these people instead of love them! In her manner, in many ways, Jessica was like his Wanna. Yet that thought carried its own rigors, hardening him to his purpose. The ways of the Harkonnen cruelty were devious. Wanna might not be dead. He had to be certain.