as soon as possible—as soon as you’re sure,” he said.
She shuddered. “By all means. I should not want to bear a child in this terrible place.”
“The things we do in the name of humanity,” he said.
“Yours is the easy part,” she said.
“There are some ancient prejudices I overcome,” he said. “They’re quite primordial, you know.”
“My poor dear,” she said, and patted his cheek. “You know this is the only way to be sure of saving that bloodline.”
He spoke in a dry voice: “I quite understand what we do.”
“We won’t fail,” she said.
“Guilt starts as a feeling of failure,” he reminded.
“There’ll be no guilt,” she said. “Hypno-ligation of that Feyd-Rautha’s psyche and his child in my womb—then we go.”
“That uncle,” he said. “Have you ever seen such distortion?”
“He’s pretty fierce,” she said, “but the nephew could well grow to be worse.”
“Thanks to that uncle. You know, when you think what this lad could’ve been with some other upbringing—with the Atreides code to guide him, for example.”
“It’s sad,” she said.
“Would that we could’ve saved both the Atreides youth and this one. From what I heard of that young Paul—a most admirable lad, good union of breeding and training.” He shook his head. “But we shouldn’t waste sorrow over the aristocracy of misfortune.”
“There’s a Bene Gesserit saying,” she said.
“You have sayings for everything!” he protested.
“You’ll like this one,” she said. “It goes: ‘Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.’ ”
***
MuadDib tells us in “A Time of Reflection” that his first collisions with Arrakeen necessities were the true beginnings of his education. He learned then how to pole the sand for its weather, learned the language of the wind‘s needles stinging his skin, learned how the nose can buzz with sand-itch and how to gather his body’s precious moisture around him to guard it and preserve it. As his eyes assumed the blue of the Ibad, he teamed the Chakobsa way.
—Stilgar’s preface to “Muad’Dib, the Man” by the Princess Irulan
STILGAR’S TROOP returning to the sietch with its two strays from the desert climbed out of the basin in the waning light of the first moon. The robed figures hurried with the smell of home in their nostrils. Dawn’s gray line behind them was brightest at the notch in their horizon-calendar that marked the middle of autumn, the month of Caprock.
Wind-raked dead leaves strewed the cliffbase where the sietch children had been gathering them, but the sounds of the troop’s passage (except for occasional blunderings by Paul and his mother) could not be distinguished from the natural sounds of the night.
Paul wiped sweat-caked dust from his forehead, felt a tug at his arm, heard Chani’s voice hissing. “Do as I told you: bring the fold of your hood down over your forehead! Leave only the eyes exposed. You waste moisture.”
A whispered command behind them demanded silence: “The desert hears you!”
A bird chirruped from the rocks high above them.
The troop stopped, and Paul sensed abrupt tension.
There came a faint thumping from the rocks, a sound no louder than mice jumping in the sand.
Again, the bird chirruped.
A stir passed through the troop’s ranks. And again, the mouse-thumping pecked its way across the sand.
Once more, the bird chirruped.
The troop resumed its climb up into a crack in the rocks, but there was a stillness of breath about the Fremen now that filled Paul with caution, and he noted covert glances toward Chani, the way she seemed to withdraw, pulling in upon herself.
There was rock underfoot now, a faint gray swishing of robes around them, and Paul sensed a relaxing of discipline, but still that quiet-of-the-person about Chani and the others. He followed a shadow shape—up steps, a turn, more steps, into a tunnel, past two moisture-sealed doors and into a globelighted narrow passage with yellow rock walls and ceiling.
All around him, Paul saw the Fremen throwing back their hoods, removing nose plugs, breathing deeply. Someone sighed. Paul looked for Chani, found that she had left his side. He was hemmed in by a press of robed bodies. Someone jostled him, said, “Excuse me, Usul. What a crush! It’s always this way.”
On his left, the narrow bearded face of the one called Farok turned toward Paul. The stained eyepits and blue darkness of eyes appeared even darker under the yellow globes. “Throw off your hood, Usul,” Farok said. “You’re home.” And he helped Paul, releasing the hood catch, elbowing a space around them.