of responsibility had driven the old fears away and she had been wide open to the inner lives, demanding their advice, plunging into spice trance in search of guiding visions.
The crisis came on a day like many others in the spring month of Laab, a clear morning at Muad’Dib’s Keep with a cold wind blowing down from the pole. Alia still wore the yellow for mourning, the color of the sterile sun. More and more these past few weeks she’d been denying the inner voice of her mother, who tended to sneer at preparation for the coming Holy Days to be centered on the Temple.
The inner-awareness of Jessica faded, faded . . . sinking away at last with a faceless demand that Alia would be better occupied working on the Atreides Law. New lives began to clamor for their moment of consciousness. Alia felt that she had opened a bottomless pit, and faces arose out of it like a swarm of locusts, until she came at last to focus on one who was like a beast: the old Baron Harkonnen. In terrified outrage she had screamed out against all of that inner clamor, winning a temporary silence.
On this morning, Alia took her pre-breakfast walk through the Keep’s roof garden. In a new attempt to win the inner battle, she tried to hold her entire awareness within Choda’s admonition to the Zensunni:
“Leaving the ladder, one may fall upward!”
But morning’s glow along the cliffs of the Shield Wall kept distracting her. Plantings of resilient fuzz-grass filled the garden’s pathways. When she looked away from the Shield Wall she saw dew on the grass, the catch of all the moisture which had passed here in the night. It reflected her own passage as of a multitude.
That multitude made her giddy. Each reflection carried the imprint of a face from the inner multitude.
She tried to focus her mind on what the grass implied. The presence of plentiful dew told her how far the ecological transformation had progressed on Arrakis. The climate of these northern latitudes was growing warmer; atmospheric carbon dioxide was on the increase. She reminded herself how many new hectares would be put under green plants in the coming year—and it required thirty-seven thousand cubic feet of water to irrigate just one hectare.
Despite every attempt at mundane thoughts, she could not drive away the sharklike circling of all those others within her.
She put her hands to her forehead and pressed.
Her temple guards had brought her a prisoner to judge at sunset the previous day: one Essas Paymon, a dark little man ostensibly in the pay of a house minor, the Nebiros, who traded in holy artifacts and small manufactured items for decoration. Actually Paymon was known to be a CHOAM spy whose task was to assess the yearly spice crop. Alia had been on the point of sending him into the dungeons when he’d protested loudly “the injustice of the Atreides.” That could have brought him an immediate sentence of death on the hanging tripod, but Alia had been caught by his boldness. She’d spoken sternly from her Throne of Judgment, trying to frighten him into revealing more than he’d already told her inquisitors.
“Why are our spice crops of such interest to the Combine Honnete?” she demanded. “Tell us and we may spare you.”
“I only collect something for which there is a market,” Paymon said. “I know nothing of what is done with my harvest.”
“And for this petty profit you interfere with our royal plans?” Alia demanded.
“Royalty never considers that we might have plans, too,” he countered.
Alia, captivated by his desperate audacity, said: “Essas Paymon, will you work for me?”
At this a grin whitened his dark face, and he said: “You were about to obliterate me without a qualm. What is my new value that you should suddenly make a market for it?”
“You’ve a simple and practical value,” she said. “You’re bold and you’re for hire to the highest bidder. I can bid higher than any other in the Empire.”
At which, he named a remarkable sum which he required for his services, but Alia laughed and countered with a figure she considered more reasonable and undoubtedly far more than he’d ever before received. She added: “And, of course, I throw in the gift of your life upon which, I presume, you place an even more inordinate value.”
“A bargain!” Paymon cried and, at a signal from Alia, was led away by her priestly Master of Appointments, Ziarenko Javid.