The remains of a conch shell from the seas of Mother Earth lay on a low table beside the balcony rail. He took its lustrous smoothness into his hands, tried to feel backward in Time. The pearl surface reflected glittering moons of light. He tore his gaze from it, peered upward past the garden to a sky become a conflagration—trails of rainbow dust shining in the silver sun.
My Fremen call themselves “Children of the Moon,” he thought.
He put down the conch, strode along the balcony. Did that terrifying moon hold out hope of escape? He probed for meaning in the region of mystic communion. He felt weak, shaken, still gripped by the spice.
At the north end of his plasmeld chasm, he came in sight of the lower buildings of the government warren. Foot traffic thronged the roof walks. He felt that the people moved there like a frieze against a background of doors, walls, tile designs. The people were tiles! When he blinked, he could hold them frozen in his mind. A frieze.
A moon falls and is gone.
A feeling came over him that the city out there had been translated into an odd symbol for his universe. The buildings he could see had been erected on the plain where his Fremen had obliterated the Sardaukar legions. Ground once trampled by battles rang now to the rushing clamor of business.
Keeping to the balcony’s outer edge, Paul strode around the corner. Now, his vista was a suburb where city structures lost themselves in rocks and the blowing sand of the desert. Alia’s temple dominated the foreground; green and black hangings along its two-thousand-meter sides displayed the moon symbol of Muad’dib.
A falling moon.
Paul passed a hand across his forehead and eyes. The symbol-metropolis oppressed him. He despised his own thoughts. Such vacillation in another would have aroused his anger.
He loathed his city!
Rage rooted in boredom flickered and simmered deep within him, nurtured by decisions that couldn’t be avoided. He knew which path his feet must follow. He’d seen it enough times, hadn’t he? Seen it! Once … long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.
Paul stared out across the rooftops. What treasures of untrammeled life lay beneath those roofs? He glimpsed leaf-green places, open plantings amidst the chalk-red and gold of the roofs. Green, the gift of Muad’dib and his water. Orchards and groves lay within his view—open plantings to rival those of fabled Lebanon.
“Muad’dib spends water like a madman,” Fremen said.
Paul put his hands over his eyes.
The moon fell.
He dropped his hands, stared at his metropolis with clarified vision. Buildings took on an aura of monstrous imperial barbarity. They stood enormous and bright beneath the northern sun. Colossi! Every extravagance of architecture a demented history could produce lay within his view: terraces of mesa proportion, squares as large as some cities, parks, premises, bits of cultured wilderness.
Superb artistry abutted inexplicable prodigies of dismal tastless ness. Details impressed themselves upon him: a postern out of most ancient Baghdad … a dome dreamed in mythical Damascus … an arch from the low gravity of Atar … harmonious elevations and queer depths. All created an effect of unrivaled magnificence.
A moon! A moon! A moon!
Frustration tangled him. He felt the pressure of mass-unconscious, that burgeoning sweep of humankind across his universe. They rushed upon him with a force like a gigantic tidal bore. He sensed the vast migrations at work in human affairs: eddies, currents, gene flows. No dams of abstinence, no seizures of impotence nor maledictions could stop it.
Muad’dib’s Jihad was less than an eye-blink in this larger movement. The Bene Gesserit swimming in this tide, that corporate entity trading in genes, was trapped in the torrent as he was. Visions of a falling moon must be measured against other legends, other visions in a universe where even the seemingly eternal stars waned, flickered, died …
What mattered a single moon in such a universe?
Far within his fortress citadel, so deep within that the sound sometimes lost itself in the flow of city noises, a ten-string rebaba tinkled with a song of the Jihad, a lament for a woman left behind on Arrakis:
The song sickened him. A tune for stupid creatures lost in sentimentality! As well sing to the dune-impregnated corpse Alia had seen.
A figure moved in shadows of the balcony’s grillwork. Paul whirled.
The ghola emerged into the sun’s full glare. His metal eyes glittered.
“Is it Duncan Idaho or the man called Hayt?” Paul asked.
The ghola came to a stop two paces from him. “Which would my Lord prefer?”
The voice carried a soft ring of caution.
“Play the Zensunni,” Paul said bitterly. Meanings within meanings! What could a Zensunni philosopher say or do to change one jot of the reality unrolling before them at this instant?
“My Lord is troubled.”
Paul turned away, stared at the Shield Wall’s distant scarp, saw wind-carved arches and buttresses, terrible mimicry of his city. Nature playing a joke on him! See what I can build! He recognized a slash in the distant massif, a place where sand spilled from a crevasse, and thought: There! Right there, we fought Sardaukar!
“What troubles my lord?” the ghola asked.
“A vision,” Paul whispered.
“Ahhhhh, when the Tleilaxu first awakened me, I had visions. I was restless, lonely … not really knowing I was lonely. Not then. My visions revealed nothing! The Tleilaxu told me it was an intrusion of the flesh which men and gholas all suffer, a sickness, no more.”
Paul turned, studied the ghola’s eyes, those pitted, steely balls without expression. What visions did those eyes see?
“Duncan … Duncan …” Paul whispered.
“I am called Hayt.”
“I saw a moon fall,” Paul said. “It was gone, destroyed. I heard a great hissing. The earth shook.”
“You are drunk on too much time,” the ghola said.
“I ask for the Zensunni and get the mentat!” Paul said. “Very well! Play my vision through your logic, mentat. Analyze it and reduce it to mere words laid out for burial.”
“Burial, indeed,” the ghola said. “You run from death. You strain at the next instant, refuse to live here and now. Augury! What a crutch for an Emperor!”
Paul found himself fascinated by a well-remembered mole on the ghola’s chin.
“Trying to live in this future,” the ghola said, “do you give substance to such a future? Do you make it real?”
“If I go the way of my vision-future, I’ll be alive then,” Paul muttered. “What makes you think I want to live there?”
The ghola shrugged. “You asked me for a substantial answer.”
“Where is there substance in a universe composed of events?” Paul asked. “Is there a final answer? Doesn’t each solution produce new questions?”
“You’ve digested so much time you have delusions of immortality,” the ghola said. “Even your Empire, my lord, must live its time and die.”