Paul’s gaze followed the Qizara. Korba took his seat at Paul’s left, dark features composed, eyes glazed by fanaticism. He’d enjoyed that moment of religious power.
“The spirit presence has been invoked,” he said.
“Thank the lord for that,” Alia said.
Korba’s lips went white.
Again, Paul studied his sister, wondered at her motives. Her innocence masked deception, he told himself. She’d come out of the same Bene Gesserit breeding program as he had. What had the kwisatz haderach genetics produced in her? There was always that mysterious difference: she’d been an embryo in the womb when her mother had survived the raw melange poison. Mother and unborn daughter had become Reverend Mothers simultaneously. But simultaneity didn’t carry identity.
Of the experience, Alia said that in one terrifying instant she had awakened to consciousness, her memory absorbing the uncounted other-lives which her mother was assimilating.
“I became my mother and all the others,” she said. “I was unformed, unborn, but I became an old woman then and there.”
Sensing his thoughts on her, Alia smiled at Paul. His expression softened. How could anyone react to Korba with other than cynical humor? he asked himself. What is more ridiculous than a Death Commando transformed into a priest?
Stilgar tapped his papers. “If my liege permits,” he said. “These are matters urgent and dire.”
“The Tupile Treaty?” Paul asked.
“The Guild maintains that we must sign this treaty without knowing the precise location of the Tupile Entente,” Stilgar said. “They’ve some support from Landsraad delegates.”
“What pressures have you brought to bear?” Irulan asked.
“Those pressures which my Emperor has designated for this enterprise,” Stilgar said. The stiff formality of his reply contained all his disapproval of the Princess Consort.
“My Lord and husband,” Irulan said, turning to Paul, forcing him to acknowledge her.
Emphasizing the titular difference in front of Chani, Paul thought, is a weakness. In such moments, he shared Stilgar’s dislike for Irulan, but sympathy tempered his emotions. What was Irulan but a Bene Gesserit pawn?
“Yes?” Paul said.
Irulan stared at him. “If you withheld their melange …”
Chani shook her head in dissent.
“We tread with caution,” Paul said. “Tupile remains the place of sanctuary for defeated Great Houses. It symbolizes a last resort, a final place of safety for all our subjects. Exposing the sanctuary makes it vulnerable.”
“If they can hide people they can hide other things,” Stilgar rumbled. “An army, perhaps, or the beginnings of melange culture which—”
“You don’t back people into a corner,” Alia said. “Not if you want them to remain peaceful.” Ruefully, she saw that she’d been drawn into the contention which she’d foreseen.
“So we’ve spent ten years of negotiation for nothing,” Irulan said.
“None of my brother’s actions is for nothing,” Alia said.
Irulan picked up a scribe, gripped it with white-knuckled intensity. Paul saw her marshal emotional control in the Bene Gesserit way: the penetrating inward stare, deep breathing. He could almost hear her repeating the litany. Presently, she said: “What have we gained?”
“We’ve kept the Guild off balance,” Chani said.
“We want to avoid a showdown confrontation with our enemies,” Alia said. “We have no special desire to kill them. There’s enough butchery going on under the Atreides banner.”
She feels it, too, Paul thought. Strange, what a sense of compelling responsibility they both felt for that brawling, idolatrous universe with its ecstasies of tranquility and wild motion. Must we protect them from themselves? he wondered. They play with nothingness every moment—empty lives, empty words. They ask too much of me. His throat felt tight and full. How many moments would he lose? What sons? What dreams? Was it worth the price his vision had revealed? Who would ask the living of some far distant future, who would say to them: “But for Muad’dib, you would not be here.”
“Denying them their melange would solve nothing,” Chani said. “So the Guild’s navigators would lose their ability to see into timespace. Your Sisters of the Bene Gesserit would lose their truthsense. Some people might die before their time. Communication would break down. Who could be blamed?”
“They wouldn’t let it come to that,” Irulan said.
“Wouldn’t they?” Chani asked. “Why not? Who could blame the Guild? They’d be helpless, demonstrably so.”
“We’ll sign the treaty as it stands,” Paul said.
“M’Lord,” Stilgar said, concentrating on his hands, “there is a question in our minds.”
“Yes?” Paul gave the old Fremen his full attention.
“You have certain … powers,” Stilgar said. “Can you not locate the Entente despite the Guild?”
Powers! Paul thought. Stilgar couldn’t just say: “You’re prescient. Can’t you trace a path in the future that leads to Tupile?”
Paul looked at the golden surface of the table. Always the same problem: How could he express the limits of the inexpressible? Should he speak of fragmentation, the natural destiny of all power? How could someone who’d never experienced the spice change of prescience conceive an awareness containing no localized spacetime, no personal image-vector nor associated sensory captives?
He looked at Alia, found her attention on Irulan. Alia sensed his movement, glanced at him, nodded toward Irulan. Ahhh, yes: any answer they gave would find its way into one of Irulan’s special reports to the Bene Gesserit. They never gave up seeking an answer to their kwisatz haderach.
Stilgar, though, deserved an answer of some kind. For that matter, so did Irulan.
“The uninitiated try to conceive of prescience as obeying a Natural Law,” Paul said. He steepled his hands in front of him. “But it’d be just as correct to say it’s heaven speaking to us, that being able to read the future is a harmonious act of man’s being. In other words, prediction is a natural consequence in the wave of the present. It wears the guise of nature, you see. But such powers cannot be used from an attitude that prestates aims and purposes. Does a chip caught in the wave say where it’s going? There’s no cause and effect in the oracle. Causes become occasions of convections and confluences, places where the currents meet. Accepting prescience, you fill your being with concepts repugnant to the intellect. Your intellectual consciousness, therefore, rejects them. In rejecting, intellect becomes a part of the processes, and is subjugated.”
“You cannot do it?” Stilgar asked.
“Were I to seek Tupile with prescience,” Paul said, speaking directly to Irulan, “this might hide Tupile.”
“Chaos!” Irulan protested. “It has no … no … consistency.”
“I did say it obeys no Natural Law,” Paul said.
“Then there are limits to what you can see or do with your powers?” Irulan asked.
Before Paul could answer, Alia said: “Dear Irulan, prescience has no limits. Not consistent? Consistency isn’t a necessary aspect of the universe.”
“But he said …”
“How can my brother give you explicit information about the limits of something which has no limits? The boundaries escape the intellect.”
That was a nasty thing for Alia to do, Paul thought. It would alarm Irulan, who had such a careful consciousness, so dependent upon values derived from precise limits. His gaze went to Korba, who sat in a pose of religious reverie—listening with the soul. How could the Qizarate use this exchange? More religious mystery? Something to evoke awe? No doubt.