“The greatest palatinate earl and the lowliest stipendiary serf share the same problem. You cannot hire a mentat or any other intellect to solve it for you. There’s no writ of inquest or calling of witnesses to provide answers. No servant—or disciple—can dress the wound. You dress it yourself or continue bleeding for all to see.”
She whirled away from him, realizing in the instant of action what this betrayed about her own feelings. Without wile of voice or witch-wrought trickery, he had reached into her psyche once more. How did he do this?
“What have you told him to do?” she whispered.
“I told him to judge, to impose order.”
Alia stared out at the guard, marking how patiently they waited—how orderly. “To dispense justice,” she murmured.
“Not that!” he snapped. “I suggested that he judge, no more, guided by one principle, perhaps …”
“And that?”
“To keep his friends and destroy his enemies.”
“To judge unjustly, then.”
“What is justice? Two forces collide. Each may have the right in his own sphere. And here’s where an Emperor commands orderly solutions. Those collisions he cannot prevent—he solves.”
“How?”
“In the simplest way: he decides.”
“Keeping his friends and destroying his enemies.”
“Isn’t that stability? People want order, this kind or some other. They sit in the prison of their hungers and see that war has become the sport of the rich. That’s a dangerous form of sophistication. It’s disorderly.”
“I will suggest to my brother that you are much too dangerous and must be destroyed,” she said, turning to face him.
“A solution I’ve already suggested,” he said.
“And that’s why you are dangerous,” she said, measuring out her words. “You’ve mastered your passions.”
“That is not why I’m dangerous.” Before she could move, he leaned across, gripped her chin in one hand, planted his lips on hers.
It was a gentle kiss, brief. He pulled away and she stared at him with a shock leavened by glimpses of spasmodic grins on the faces of her guardsmen still standing at orderly attention outside.
Alia put a finger to her lips. There’d been such a sense of familiarity about that kiss. His lips had been flesh of a future she’d seen in some prescient byway. Breast heaving, she said: “I should have you flayed.”
“Because I’m dangerous?”
“Because you presume too much!”
“I presume nothing. I take nothing which is not first offered to me. Be glad I did not take all that was offered.” He opened his door, slid out. “Come along. We’ve dallied too long on a fool’s errand.” He strode toward the entrance dome beyond the pad.
Alia leaped out, ran to match his stride. “I’ll tell him everything you’ve said and everything you did,” she said.
“Good.” He held the door for her.
“He will order you executed,” she said, slipping into the dome.
“Why? Because I took the kiss I wanted?” He followed her, his movement forcing her back. The door slid closed behind him.
“The kiss you wanted!” Outrage filled her.
“All right, Alia. The kiss you wanted, then.” He started to move around her toward the drop field.
As though his movement had propelled her into heightened awareness, she realized his candor—the utter truthfulness of him. The kiss I wanted, she told herself. True.
“Your truthfulness, that’s what’s dangerous,” she said, following him.
“You return to the ways of wisdom,” he said, not breaking his stride. “A mentat could not’ve stated the matter more directly. Now: what is it you saw in the desert?”
She grabbed his arm, forcing him to a halt. He’d done it again: shocked her mind into sharpened awareness.
“I can’t explain it,” she said, “but I keep thinking of the Face Dancers. Why is that?”
“That is why your brother sent you to the desert,” he said, nodding.
“Tell him of this persistent thought.”
“But why?” She shook her head. “Why Face Dancers?”
“There’s a young woman dead out there,” he said. “Perhaps no young woman is reported missing among the Fremen.”
***
I think what a joy it is to be alive, and I wonder if I’ll ever leap inward to the root of this flesh and know myself as once I was. The root is there. Whether any act of mine can find it, that remains tangled in the future. But all things a man can do are mine. Any act of mine may do it.
As he lay immersed in the screaming odor of the spice, staring inward through the oracular trance, Paul saw the moon become an elongated sphere. It rolled and twisted, hissing—the terrible hissing of a star being quenched in an infinite sea—down … down … down … like a ball thrown by a child.
It was gone.
This moon had not set. Realization engulfed him. It was gone: no moon. The earth quaked like an animal shaking its skin. Terror swept over him.
Paul jerked upright on his pallet, eyes wide open, staring. Part of him looked outward, part inward. Outwardly, he saw the plasmeld grillwork which vented his private room, and he knew he lay beside a stonelike abyss of his Keep. Inwardly, he continued to see the moon fall.
Out! Out!
His grillwork of plasmeld looked onto the blazing light of noon across Arrakeen. Inward—there lay blackest night. A shower of sweet odors from a garden roof nibbled at his senses, but no floral perfume could roll back that fallen moon.
Paul swung his feet to the cold surface of the floor, peered through the grillwork. He could see directly across to the gentle arc of a footbridge constructed of crystal-stabilized gold and platinum. Fire jewels from far Cedon decorated the bridge. It led to the galleries of the inner city across a pool and fountain filled with waterflowers. If he stood, Paul knew, he could look down into petals as clean and red as fresh blood whirling, turning there—disks of ambient color tossed on an emerald freshet.
His eyes absorbed the scene without pulling him from spice thrall dom.
That terrible vision of a lost moon.
The vision suggested a monstrous loss of individual security. Perhaps he’d seen his civilization fall, toppled by its own pretensions.
A moon … a moon … a falling moon.
It had taken a massive dose of the spice essence to penetrate the mud thrown up by the tarot. All it had shown him was a falling moon and the hateful way he’d known from the beginning. To buy an end for the Jihad, to silence the volcano of butchery, he must discredit himself.
Disengage … disengage … disengage …
Floral perfume from the garden roof reminded him of Chani. He longed for her arms now, for the clinging arms of love and forgetfulness. But even Chani could not exorcise this vision. What would Chani say if he went to her with the statement that he had a particular death in mind? Knowing it to be inevitable, why not choose an aristocrat’s death, ending life on a secret flourish, squandering any years that might have been? To die before coming to the end of willpower, was that not an aristocrat’s choice?
He stood, crossed to the lapped opening in the grillwork, went out onto a balcony which looked upward to flowers and vines trailing from the garden. His mouth held the dryness of a desert march.
Moon … moon—where is that moon?
He thought of Alia’s description, the young woman’s body found in the dunes. A Fremen addicted to semuta! Everything fitted the hateful pattern.
You do not take from this universe, he thought. It grants what it will.