will discuss it in more detail tomorrow. Now, leave me to finish my sleep.”
The Baron deactivated his doorfield, watched his nephew out of sight.
A tank-brain, the Baron thought. Muscle-minded tank-brain. They will be bloody pulp here when he’s through with them. Then, when I send in Feyd-Rautha to take the load off them, they’ll cheer their rescuer. Beloved Feyd-Rautha. Benign Feyd-Rautha, the compassionate one who saves them from a beast. Feyd-Rautha, a man to follow and die for. The boy will know by that time how to oppress with impunity. I’m sure he’s the one we need. He’ll learn. And such a lovely body. Really a lovely boy.
***
At the age of fifteen, he had already learned silence.
—from “A Child’s History of Muad‘Dib” by the Princess Irulan
As PAUL fought the ‘thopter’s controls, he grew aware that he was sorting out the interwoven storm forces, his more than Mentat awareness computing on the basis of fractional minutiae. He felt dust fronts, billowings, mixings of turbulence, an occasional vortex.
The cabin interior was an angry box lighted by the green radiance of instrument dials. The tan flow of dust outside appeared featureless, but his inner sense began to see through the curtain.
I must find the right vortex, he thought.
For a long time now he had sensed the storm’s power diminishing, but still it shook them. He waited out another turbulence.
The vortex began as an abrupt billowing that rattled the entire ship. Paul defied all fear to bank the ’thopter left.
Jessica saw the maneuver on the attitude globe.
“Paul!” she screamed.
The vortex turned them, twisting, tipping. It lifted the ’thopter like a chip on a geyser, spewed them up and out—a winged speck within a core of winding dust lighted by the second moon.
Paul looked down, saw the dust-defined pillar of hot wind that had disgorged them, saw the dying storm trailing away like a dry river into the desert-moon-gray motion growing smaller and smaller below as they rode the updraft.
“We’re out of it,” Jessica whispered.
Paul turned their craft away from the dust in swooping rhythm while he scanned the night sky.
“We’ve given them the slip,” he said.
Jessica felt her heart pounding. She forced herself to calmness, looked at the diminishing storm. Her time sense said they had ridden within that compounding of elemental forces almost four hours, but part of her mind computed the passage as a lifetime. She felt reborn.
It was like the litany, she thought. We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It’s gone, but we remain.
“I don’t like the sound of our wing motion,” Paul said. “We suffered some damage in there.”
He felt the grating, injured flight through his hands on the controls. They were out of the storm, but still not out into the full view of his prescient vision. Yet, they had escaped, and Paul sensed himself trembling on the verge of a revelation.
He shivered.
The sensation was magnetic and terrifying, and he found himself caught on the question of what caused this trembling awareness. Part of it, he felt, was the spice-saturated diet of Arrakis. But he thought part of it could be the litany, as though the words had a power of their own.
“Ishallnotfear…
Cause and effect: he was alive despite malignant forces, and he felt himself poised on a brink of self-awareness that could not have been without the litany’s magic.
Words from the Orange Catholic Bible rang through his memory: “What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?”
“There’s rock all around,” Jessica said.
Paul focused on the ’thopter’s launching, shook his head to clear it. He looked where his mother pointed, saw uplifting rock shapes black on the sand ahead and to the right. He felt wind around his ankles, a stirring of dust in the cabin. There was a hole somewhere, more of the storm’s doing.
“Better set us down on sand,” Jessica said. “The wings might not take full brake.”
He nodded toward a place ahead where sandblasted ridges lifted into moonlight above the dunes. “I’ll set us down near those rocks. Check your safety harness.”
She obeyed, thinking: We’ve water and stillsuits. If we can find food, we can survive a long time on this desert. Fremen live here. What they can do we can do.
“Run for those rocks the instant we’re stopped,” Paul said. “I’ll take the pack.”
“Run for….” She fell silent, nodded. “Worms.”
“Our friends, the worms,” he corrected her. “They’ll get this ’thopter. There’ll be no evidence of where we landed.”