rain. I must suppress such longings, she thought. They’re a weakness. I no longer can afford weaknesses.
Stilgar gripped her arm, pointed across the basin. “There! There you see proper Druses.”
She looked where he pointed, saw movement: people on the basin floor scattering at the daylight into the shadows of the opposite cliffwall. In spite of the distance, their movements were plain in the clear air. She lifted her binoculars from beneath her robe, focused the oil lenses on the distant people. Kerchiefs fluttered like a flight of multicolored butterflies.
“That is home,” Stilgar said. “We will be there this night.” He stared across the basin, tugging at his mustache. “My people stayed out overlate working. That means there are no patrols about. I’ll signal them later and they’ll prepare for us.”
“Your people show good discipline,” Jessica said. She lowered the binoculars, saw that Stilgar was looking at them.
“They obey the preservation of the tribe,” he said. “It is the way we choose among us for a leader. The leader is the one who is strongest, the one who brings water and security.” He lifted his attention to her face.
She returned his stare, noted the whiteless eyes, the stained eyepits, the dust-rimmed beard and mustache, the line of the catchtube curving down from his nostrils into his stillsuit.
“Have I compromised your leadership by besting you, Stilgar?” she asked.
“You did not call me out,” he said.
“It’s important that a leader keep the respect of his troop,” she said.
“Isn’t a one of those sandlice I cannot handle,” Stilgar said. “When you bested me, you bested us all. Now, they hope to learn from you … the weirding way … and some are curious to see if you intend to call me out.”
She weighed the implications. “By besting you in formal battle?”
He nodded. “I’d advise you against this because they’d not follow you. You’re not of the sand. They saw this in our night’s passage.”
“Practical people,” she said.
“True enough.” He glanced at the basin. “We know our needs. But not many are thinking deep thoughts now this close to home. We’ve been out overlong arranging to deliver our spice quota to the free traders for the cursed Guild … may their faces be forever black.”
Jessica stopped in the act of turning away from him, looked back up into his face. “The Guild? What has the Guild to do with your spice?”
“It’s Liet’s command,” Stilgar said. “We know the reason, but the taste of it sours us. We bribe the Guild with a monstrous payment in spice to keep our skies clear of satellites and such that none may spy what we do to the face of Arrakis.”
She weighed out her words, remembering that Paul had said this must be the reason Arrakeen skies were clear of satellites. “And what is it you do to the face of Arrakis that must not be seen?”
“We change it … slowly but with certainty … to make it fit for human life. Our generation will not see it, nor our children nor our children’s children nor the grandchildren of their children … but it will come.” He stared with veiled eyes out over the basin. “Open water and tall green plants and people walking freely without stillsuits.”
So that’s the dream of this Liet-Kynes, she thought. And she said: “Bribes are dangerous; they have a way of growing larger and larger.”
“They grow,” he said, “but the slow way is the safe way.”
Jessica turned, looked out over the basin, trying to see it the way Stilgar was seeing it in his imagination. She saw only the grayed mustard stain of distant rocks and a sudden hazy motion in the sky above the cliffs.
“Ah-h-h-h,” Stilgar said.
She thought at first it must be a patrol vehicle, then realized it was a mirage—another landscape hovering over the desert-sand and a distant wavering of greenery and in the middle distance a long worm traveling the surface with what looked like Fremen robes fluttering on its back.
The mirage faded.
“It would be better to ride,” Stilgar said, “but we cannot permit a maker into this basin. Thus, we must walk again tonight.”
Maker—theirword for worm, she thought.
She measured the import of his words, the statement that they could not permit a worm into this basin. She knew what she had seen in the mirage—Fremen riding on the back of a giant worm. It took heavy control not to betray her shock at the implications.
“We must be getting back to the others,” Stilgar said. “Else my people may suspect