“What was your intention?”
She smiled shyly, meeting his gaze. “If you’re angered, love, please don’t hide it.”
Paul sank back against the headboard. “Shall I put her away?” he asked. “Her use is limited now and I don’t like the things I sense about her trip home to the Sisterhood.”
“You’ll not put her away,” Chani said. She went on massaging his legs, spoke matter-of-factly: “You’ve said many times she’s your contact with our enemies, that you can read their plans through her actions.”
“Then why ask about her desire for a child?”
“I think it’d disconcert our enemies and put Irulan in a vulnerable position should you make her pregnant.”
He read by the movements of her hands on his legs what that statement had cost her. A lump rose in his throat. Softly, he said: “Chani, beloved, I swore an oath never to take her into my bed. A child would give her too much power. Would you have her displace you?”
“I have no place.”
“Not so, Sihaya, my desert springtime. What is this sudden concern for Irulan?”
“It’s concern for you, not for her! If she carried an Atreides child, her friends would question her loyalties. The less trust our enemies place in her, the less use she is to them.”
“A child for her could mean your death,” Paul said. “You know the plotting in this place.” A movement of his arm encompassed the Keep.
“You must have an heir!” she husked.
“Ahhh,” he said.
So that was it: Chani had not produced a child for him. Someone else, then, must do it. Why not Irulan? That was the way Chani’s mind worked. And it must be done in an act of love because all the Empire avowed strong taboos against artificial ways. Chani had come to a Fremen decision.
Paul studied her face in this new light. It was a face he knew better in some ways than his own. He had seen this face soft with passion, in the sweetness of sleep, awash in fears and angers and griefs.
He closed his eyes, and Chani came into his memories as a girl once more—veiled in springtime, singing, waking from sleep beside him—so perfect that the very vision of her consumed him. In his memory, she smiled … shyly at first, then strained against the vision as though she longed to escape.
Paul’s mouth went dry. For a moment, his nostrils tasted the smoke of a devastated future and the voice of another kind of vision commanding him to disengage … disengage … disengage. His prophetic visions had been eavesdropping on eternity for such a long while, catching snatches of foreign tongues, listening to stones and to flesh not his own. Since the day of his first encounter with terrible purpose, he had peered at the future, hoping to find peace.
There existed a way, of course. He knew it by heart without knowing the heart of it—a rote future, strict in its instructions to him: disengage, disengage, disengage …
Paul opened his eyes, looked at the decision in Chani’s face. She had stopped massaging his legs, sat still now—purest Fremen. Her features remained familiar beneath the blue nezhoni scarf she often wore about her hair in the privacy of their chambers. But the mask of decision sat on her, an ancient and alien-to-him way of thinking. Fremen women had shared their men for thousands of years—not always in peace, but with a way of making the fact nondestructive. Something mysteriously Fremen in this fashion had happened in Chani.
“You’ll give me the only heir I want,” he said.
“You’ve seen this?” she asked, making it obvious by her emphasis that she referred to prescience.
As he had done many times, Paul wondered how he could explain the delicacy of the oracle, the Timelines without number which vision waved before him on an undulating fabric. He sighed, remembered water lifted from a river in the hollow of his hands—trembling, draining. Memory drenched his face in it. How could he drench himself in futures growing increasingly obscure from the pressures of too many oracles?
“You’ve not seen it, then,” Chani said.
That vision-future scarce any longer accessible to him except at the expenditure of life-draining effort, what could it show them except grief? Paul asked himself. He felt that he occupied an inhospitable middle zone, a wasted place where his emotions drifted, swayed, swept outward in unchecked restlessness.
Chani covered his legs, said: “An heir to House Atreides, this is not something you leave to chance or one woman.”
That was a thing his mother might’ve said, Paul thought. He wondered if the Lady Jessica had been in secret communication with Chani. His mother would think in terms of House Atreides. It was a pattern bred and conditioned into her by the Bene Gesserit, and would hold true even now when her powers were turned against the Sisterhood.
“You listened when Irulan came to me today,” he accused.
“I listened.” She spoke without looking at him.
Paul focused his memory on the encounter with Irulan. He’d let himself into the family salon, noted an unfinished robe on Chani’s loom. There’d been an acrid wormsmell to the place, an evil odor which almost hid the underlying cinnamon bite of melange. Someone had spilled unchanged spice essence and left it to combine there with a spice-based rug. It had not been a felicitous combination. Spice essence had dissolved the rug. Oily marks lay congealed on the plas tone floor where the rug had been. He’d thought to send for someone to clean away the mess, but Harah, Stilgar’s wife and Chani’s closest feminine friend, had slipped in to announce Irulan.
He’d been forced to conduct the interview in the presence of that evil smell, unable to escape a Fremen superstition that evil smells foretold disaster.
Harah withdrew as Irulan entered.
“Welcome,” Paul said.
Irulan wore a robe of gray whale fur. She pulled it close, touched a hand to her hair. He could see her wondering at his mild tone. The angry words she’d obviously prepared for this meeting could be sensed leaving her mind in a welter of second thoughts.
“You came to report that the Sisterhood had lost its last vestige of morality,” he said.
“Isn’t it dangerous to be that ridiculous?” she asked.
“To be ridiculous and dangerous, a questionable alliance,” he said. His renegade Bene Gesserit training detected her putting down an impulse to withdraw. The effort exposed a brief glimpse of underlying fear, and he saw she’d been assigned a task not to her liking.
“They expect a bit too much from a princess of the blood royal,” he said.
Irulan grew very still and Paul became aware that she had locked herself into a viselike control. A heavy burden, indeed, he thought. And he wondered why prescient visions had given him no glimpse of this possible future.
Slowly, Irulan relaxed. There was no point in surrendering to fear, no point in retreat, she had decided.
“You’ve allowed the weather to fall into a very primitive pattern,” she said, rubbing her arms through the robe. “It was dry and there was a sandstorm today. Are you never going to let it rain here?”
“You didn’t come here to talk about the weather,” Paul said. He felt that he had been submerged in double meanings. Was Irulan trying to tell him something which her training would not permit her to say openly? It seemed that way. He felt that he had been cast adrift suddenly and now must thrash his way back to some steady place.
“I must have a child,” she said.
He shook his head from side to side.
“I must have my way!” she snapped. “If need be, I’ll find another father for my child. I’ll cuckold you and dare you to expose me.”
“Cuckold me all you wish,” he said, “but no child.”
“How can you stop me?”
With a smile of utmost kindness, he said: “I’d have you garroted, if it came to that.”