Why am I hesitating? Paul wondered. It is the second door from the far end. I knew that without being told. But this thing must be played out with precision. So … I hesitate.
The noise of an argument arose suddenly from the corner house on Paul’s left. A woman there berated someone: the new wing of their house leaked dust, she complained. Did he think water fell from heaven? If dust came in, moisture got out.
Some remember, Paul thought.
He moved down the street and the quarrel faded away behind.
Water from heaven! he thought.
Some Fremen had seen that wonder on other worlds. He had seen it himself, had ordered it for Arrakis, but the memory of it felt like something that had occurred to another person. Rain, it was called. Abruptly, he recalled a rainstorm on his birthworld—clouds thick and gray in the sky of Caladan, an electric storm presence, moist air, the big wet drops drumming on skylights. It ran in rivulets off the eaves. Storm drains took the water away to a river which ran muddy and turgid past the Family orchards … trees there with their barren branches glistening wetly.
Paul’s foot caught in a low drift of sand across the street. For an instant, he felt mud clinging to the shoes of his childhood. Then he was back in the sand, in the dust-clotted, wind-muffled darkness with the Future hanging over him, taunting. He could feel the aridity of life around him like an accusation. You did this! They’d become a civilization of dry-eyed watchers and taletellers, people who solved all problems with power … and more power … and still more power—hating every erg of it.
Rough stones came underfoot. His vision remembered them. The dark rectangle of a doorway appeared on his right—black in black: Otheym’s house, Fate’s house, a place different from the ones around it only in the role Time had chosen for it. It was a strange place to be marked down in history.
The door opened to his knock. The gap revealed the dull green light of an atrium. A dwarf peered out, ancient face on a child’s body, an apparition prescience had never seen.
“You’ve come then,” the apparition said. The dwarf stepped aside, no awe in his manner, merely the gloating of a slow smile. “Come in! Come in!”
Paul hesitated. There’d been no dwarf in the vision, but all else remained identical. Visions could contain such disparities and still hold true to their original plunge into infinity. But the difference dared him to hope. He glanced back up the street at the creamy pearl glistening of his moon swimming out of jagged shadows. The moon haunted him. How did it fall?
“Come in,” the dwarf insisted.
Paul entered, heard the door thud into its moisture seals behind. The dwarf passed him, led the way, enormous feet slapping the floor, opened the delicate lattice gate into the roofed central courtyard, gestured. “They await, Sire.”
Sire, Paul thought. He knows me, then.
Before Paul could explore this discovery, the dwarf slipped away down a side passage. Hope was a dervish wind whirling, dancing in Paul. He headed across the courtyard. It was a dark and gloomy place, the smell of sickness and defeat in it. He felt daunted by the atmosphere. Was it defeat to choose a lesser evil? he wondered. How far down this track had he come?
Light poured from a narrow doorway in the far wall. He put down the feeling of watchers and evil smells, entered the doorway into a small room. It was a barren place by Fremen standards with hiereg hangings on only two walls. Opposite the door, a man sat on carmine cushions beneath the best hanging. A feminine figure hovered in shadows behind another doorway in a barren wall to the left.
Paul felt vision-trapped. This was the way it’d gone. Where was the dwarf? Where was the difference?
His senses absorbed the room in a single gestalten sweep. The place had received painstaking care despite its poor furnishings. Hooks and rods across the barren walls showed where hangings had been removed. Pilgrims paid enormous prices for authentic Fremen artifacts, Paul reminded himself. Rich pilgrims counted desert tapestries as treasures, true marks of a hajj.
Paul felt that the barren walls accused him with their fresh gypsum wash. The threadbare condition of the two remaining hangings amplified the sense of guilt.
A narrow shelf occupied the wall on his right. It held a row of portraits—mostly bearded Fremen, some in stillsuits with their catch-tubes dangling, some in Imperial uniforms posed against exotic offworld backgrounds. The most common scene was a seascape.
The Fremen on cushions cleared his throat, forcing Paul to look at him. It was Otheym precisely as the vision had revealed him: neck grown scrawny, a bird thing which appeared too weak to support the large head. The face was a lopsided ruin—networks of crisscrossed scars on the left cheek below a drooping, wet eye, but clear skin on the other side and a straight, blue-in-blue Fremen gaze. A long kedge of a nose bisected the face.
Otheym’s cushion sat in the center of a threadbare rug, brown with maroon and gold threads. The cushion fabric betrayed splotches of wear and patching, but every bit of metal around the seated figure shone from polishing—the portrait frames, shelf lip and brackets, the pedestal of a low table on the right.
Paul nodded to the clear half of Otheym’s face, said: “Good luck to you and your dwelling place.” It was the greeting of an old friend and sietch mate.
“So I see you once more, Usul.”
The voice speaking his tribal name whined with an old man’s quavering. The dull drooping eye on the ruined side of the face moved above the parchment skin and scars. Gray bristles stubbled that side and the jawline there hung with scabrous peelings. Otheym’s mouth twisted as he spoke, the gap exposing silvery metal teeth.
“Muad’dib always answers the call of a Fedaykin,” Paul said.
The woman in the doorway shadows moved, said: “So Stilgar boasts.”
She came forward into the light, an older version of the Lichna which the Face Dancer had copied. Paul recalled then that Otheym had married sisters. Her hair was gray, nose grown witch-sharp. Weavers’ calluses ran along her forefingers and thumbs. A Fremen woman would’ve displayed such marks proudly in the sietch days, but she saw his attention on her hands, hid them under a fold of her pale blue robe.
Paul remembered her name then—Dhuri. The shock was he remembered her as a child, not as she’d been in his vision of these moments. It was the whine that edged her voice, Paul told himself. She’d whined even as a child.
“You see me here,” Paul said. “Would I be here if Stilgar hadn’t approved?” He turned toward Otheym. “I carry your water burden, Otheym. Command me.”
This was the straight Fremen talk of sietch brothers.
Otheym produced a shaky nod, almost too much for that thin neck. He lifted a liver-marked left hand, pointed to the ruin of his face. “I caught the splitting disease on Tarahell, Usul,” he wheezed. “Right after the victory when we’d all …” A fit of coughing stopped his voice.
“The tribe will collect his water soon,” Dhuri said. She crossed to Otheym, propped pillows behind him, held his shoulder to steady him until the coughing passed. She wasn’t really very old, Paul saw, but a look of lost hopes ringed her mouth, bitterness lay in her eyes.
“I’ll summon doctors,” Paul said.
Dhuri turned, hand on hip. “We’ve had medical men, as good as any you could summon.” She sent an involuntary glance to the barren wall on her left.
And the medical men were costly, Paul thought.
He felt edgy, constrained by the vision but aware that minor differences had crept in. How could he exploit the differences? Time came out of its skein with subtle changes, but the background fabric held oppressive sameness. He knew with terrifying certainty that if he tried to break out of the enclosing pattern here, it’d become a thing of terrible violence. The power in this deceptively gentle flow of Time oppressed him.