Alia prepared to leave the Judgment Hall, Javid came hurrying to report that Paymon had been overheard to mutter the fateful lines from the Orange Catholic Bible: “Maleficos non patieris vivere.”
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Alia translated. So that was his gratitude! He was one of those who plotted against her very life! In a flush of rage such as she’d never before experienced, she ordered Paymon’s immediate execution, sending his body to the Temple deathstill where his water, at least, would be of some value in the priestly coffers.
And all night long Paymon’s dark face haunted her.
She tried all of her tricks against this persistent, accusing image, reciting the Bu Ji from the Fremen Book of Kreos: “Nothing occurs! Nothing occurs! ” But Paymon took her through a wearing night into this giddy new day, where she could see that his face had joined those in the jeweled reflections from the dew.
A female guard called her to breakfast from the roof door behind a low hedge of mimosa. Alia sighed. She felt small choice between hells: the outcry within her mind or the outcry from her attendants—all were pointless voices, but persistent in their demands, hourglass noises that she would like to silence with the edge of a knife.
Ignoring the guard, Alia stared across the roof garden toward the Shield Wall. A bahada had left its broad outwash like a detrital fan upon the sheltered floor of her domain. The delta of sand spread out before her gaze, outlined by the morning sun. It came to her that an uninitiated eye might see that broad fan as evidence of a river’s flow, but it was no more than the place where her brother had shattered the Shield Wall with the Atreides Family atomics, opening a path from the desert for the sandworms which had carried his Fremen troops to shocking victory over his Imperial predecessor, Shaddam IV. Now a broad qanat flowed with water on the Shield Wall’s far side to block off sandworm intrusions. Sandworms would not cross open water; it poisoned them.
Would that I had such a barrier within my mind, she thought.
The thought increased her giddy sensation of being separated from reality.
Sandworms! Sandworms!
Her memory presented a collection of sandworm images: mighty Shai-Hulud, the demiurge of the Fremen, deadly beast of the desert’s depths whose outpourings included the priceless spice. How odd it was, this sandworm, to grow from a flat and leathery sandtrout, she thought. They were like the flocking multitude within her awareness. The sandtrout, when linked edge to edge against the planet’s bedrock, formed living cisterns; they held back the water that their sandworm vector might live. Alia could feel the analogy: some of those others within her mind held back dangerous forces which could destroy her.
Again the guard called her to breakfast, a note of impatience apparent.
Angrily Alia turned, waved a dismissal signal.
The guard obeyed, but the roof door slammed.
At the sound of the slamming door, Alia felt herself caught by everything she had attempted to deny. The other lives welled up within her like a hideous tide. Each demanding life pressed its face against her vision centers—a cloud of faces. Some presented mange-spotted skin, other were callous and full of sooty shadows; there were mouths like moist lozenges. The pressure of the swarm washed over her in a current which demanded that she float free and plunge into them.
“No,” she whispered. “No . . . no . . . no . . .”
She would have collapsed onto the path but for a bench beside her which accepted her sagging body. She tried to sit, could not, stretched out on the cold plasteel, still whispering denial.
The tide continued to rise within her.
She felt attuned to the slightest show of attention, aware of the risk, but alert for every exclamation from those guarded mouths which clamored within her. They were a cacophony of demand for her attention: “Me! Me!” “No, me!” And she knew that if she once gave her attention, gave it completely, she would be lost. To behold one face out of the multitude and follow the voice of that face would be to be held by the egocentrism which shared her existence.
“Prescience does this to you,” a voice whispered.
She covered her ears with her hands, thinking: I’m not prescient! The trance doesn’t work for me!
But the voice persisted: “It might work, if you had help.”