piled around the walls. He felt a soft breeze from an air duct, saw the outlet cunningly hidden in a pattern of hangings directly ahead of him.
“Do you wish me to help you remove your stillsuit?” Harah asked.
“No… thank you.”
“Shall I bring food?”
“Yes.”
“There is a reclamation chamber off the other room.” She gestured. “For your comfort and convenience when you’re out of your stillsuit.”
“You said we have to leave this sietch,” Paul said. “Shouldn’t we be packing or something?”
“It will be done in its time,” she said. “The butchers have yet to penetrate to our region.”
Still she hesitated, staring at him.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“You’ve not the eyes of the Ibad,” she said. “It’s strange but not entirely unattractive.”
“Get the food,” he said. “I’m hungry.”
She smiled at him—a knowing, woman’s smile that he found disquieting. “I am your servant,” she said, and whirled away in one lithe motion, ducking behind a heavy wall hanging that revealed another passage before falling back into place.
Feeling angry with himself, Paul brushed through the thin hanging on the right and into the larger room. He stood there a moment caught by uncertainty. And he wondered where Chani was… Chani who had just lost her father.
We’re alike in that, he thought.
A wailing cry sounded from the outer corridors, its volume muffled by the intervening hangings. It was repeated, a bit more distant. And again. Paul realized someone was calling the time. He focused on the fact that he had seen no clocks.
The faint smell of burning creosote bush came to his nostrils, riding on the omnipresent stink of the sietch. Paul saw that he had already suppressed the odorous assault on his senses.
And he wondered again about his mother, how the moving montage of the future would incorporate her… and the daughter she bore. Mutable time-awareness danced around him. He shook his head sharply, focusing his attention on the evidences that spoke of profound depth and breadth in this Fremen culture that had swallowed them.
With its subtle oddities.
He had seen a thing about the caverns and this room, a thing that suggested far greater differences than anything he had yet encountered.
There was no sign of a poison snooper here, no indication of their use anywhere in the cave warren. Yet he could smell poisons in the sietch stench—strong ones, common ones.
He heard a rustle of hangings, thought it was Harah returning with food, and turned to watch her. Instead, from beneath a displaced pattern of hangings, he saw two young boys—perhaps aged nine and ten—staring out at him with greedy eyes. Each wore a small kindjal-type of crysknife, rested a hand on the hilt.
And Paul recalled the stories of the Fremen—that their children fought as ferociously as the adults.
***
The hands move, the lips move—Ideas gush from his words, And his eyes devour! He is an island of Selfdom.
—description from “A Manual of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
PHOSPHORTUBES IN the faraway upper reaches of the cavern cast a dim light onto the thronged interior, hinting at the great size of this rock-enclosed space… larger, Jessica saw, than even the Gathering Hall of her Bene Gesserit school. She estimated there were more than five thousand people gathered out there beneath the ledge where she stood with Stilgar.
And more were coming.
The air was murmurous with people.
“Your son has been summoned from his rest, Sayyadina,” Stilgar said. “Do you wish him to share in your decision?”
“Could he change my decision?”
“Certainly, the air with which you speak comes from your own lungs, but—”
“The decision stands,” she said.
But she felt misgivings, wondering if she should use Paul as an excuse for backing out of a dangerous course. There was an unborn daughter to think of as well. What endangered the flesh of the mother endangered the flesh of the daughter.
Men came with rolled carpets, grunting under the weight of them, stirring up dust as the loads were dropped onto the ledge.
Stilgar took her arm, led her back into the acoustical horn that formed the rear limits of the ledge. He indicated a rock bench within the horn. “The Reverend Mother will sit here, but you may rest yourself until she comes.”
“I prefer to stand,” Jessica said.
She watched the men unroll the carpets, covering the ledge, looked out at the crowd. There were at least ten thousand people on the rock floor now.
And still they came.
Out on the desert, she knew, it already was red nightfall, but here in the cavern hall was perpetual twilight, a gray vastness thronged with people come