the dark-dark eyes studying.
“Now, we know you cannot be false,” he said.
She sensed hidden meaning here, too, but the muzziness of the drug was overpowering her senses. How warm it was and soothing. How beneficent these Fremen to bring her into the fold of such companionship.
Paul saw the drug take hold of his mother.
He searched his memory—the fixed past, the flux-lines of the possible futures. It was like scanning through arrested instants of time, disconcerting to the lens of the inner eye. The fragments were difficult to understand when snatched out of the flux.
This drug—he could assemble knowledge about it, understand what it was doing to his mother, but the knowledge lacked a natural rhythm, lacked a system of mutual reflection.
He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future.
Things persisted in not being what they seemed.
“Drink it,” Chani said. She waved the hornspout of a watersack under his nose.
Paul straightened, staring at Chani. He felt carnival excitement in the air. He knew what would happen if he drank this spice drug with its quintessence of the substance that brought the change onto him. He would return to the vision of pure time, of time-become-space. It would perch him on the dizzying summit and defy him to understand.
From behind Chani, Stilgar said: “Drink it, lad. You delay the rite.”
Paul listened to the crowd then, hearing the wildness in their voices—“Lisan al-Gaib,” they said. “Muad’Dib!” He looked down at his mother. She appeared peacefully asleep in a sitting position—her breathing even and deep. A phrase out of the future that was his lonely past came into his mind: “She sleeps in the Waters of Life. ”
Chani tugged at his sleeve.
Paul took the hornspout into his mouth, hearing the people shout. He felt the liquid gush into his throat as Chani pressed the sack, sensed giddiness in the fumes. Chani removed the spout, handed the sack into hands that reached for it from the floor of the cavern. His eyes focused on her arm, the green band of mourning there.
As she straightened, Chani saw the direction of his gaze, said: “I can mourn him even in the happiness of the waters. This was something he gave us.” She put her hand into his, pulling him along the ledge. “We are alike in a thing, Usul: We have each lost a father to the Harkonnens.”
Paul followed her. He felt that his head had been separated from his body and restored with odd connections. His legs were remote and rubbery.
They entered a narrow side passage, its walls dimly lighted by spaced-out glowglobes. Paul felt the drug beginning to have its unique effect on him, opening time like a flower. He found need to steady himself against Chani as they turned through another shadowed tunnel. The mixture of whipcord and softness he felt beneath her robe stirred his blood. The sensation mingled with the work of the drug, folding future and past into the present, leaving him the thinnest margin of trinocular focus.
“I know you, Chani,” he whispered. “We’ve sat upon a ledge above the sand while I soothed your fears. We’ve caressed in the dark of the sietch. We’ve….” He found himself losing focus, tried to shake his head, stumbled.
Chani steadied him, led him through thick hangings into the yellow warmth of a private apartment—low tables, cushions, a sleeping pad beneath an orange spread.
Paul grew aware that they had stopped, that Chani stood facing him, and that her eyes betrayed a look of quiet terror.
“You must tell me,” she whispered.
“You are Sihaya,” he said, “the desert spring.”
“When the tribe shares the Water,” she said, “we’re together—ail of us. We … share. I can… sense the others with me, but I’m afraid to share with you.”
“Why?”
He tried to focus on her, but past and future were merging into the present, blurring her image. He saw her in countless ways and positions and settings.
“There’s something frightening in you,” she said. “When I took you away from the others… I did it because I could feel what the others wanted. You… press on people. You… make us see things!”
He forced himself to speak distinctly: “What do you see?”
She looked down at her hands. “I see a child… in my arms. It’s our child, yours and mine.” She put a hand to her mouth. “How can I know every feature of you?”
They’ve a little of the talent, his mind