paying in a coin that’s freely available to anyone with desert power-spice. This is more than a second-approximation answer; it’s the straight-line computation. Depend on it.”
“Paul,” Jessica said, “you’re not a Mentat yet; you can’t know for sure how—”
“I’ll never be a Mentat,” he said. “I’m something else … a freak.”
“Paul! How can you say such—”
“Leave me alone!”
He turned away from her, looking out into the night. Why can’t I mourn? he wondered. He felt that every fiber of his being craved this release, but it would be denied him forever.
Jessica had never heard such distress in her son’s voice. She wanted to reach out to him, hold him, comfort him, help him—but she sensed there was nothing she could do. He had to solve this problem by himself.
The glowing tab of the Fremkit manual between them on the tent floor caught her eye. She lifted it, glanced at the flyleaf, reading: “Manual of ‘The Friendly Desert,’ the place full of life. Here are the ayat and burhan of Life. Believe, and al-Lat shall never burn you.”
It reads like the Azhar Book, she thought, recalling her studies of the Great Secrets. Has a Manipulator of Religions been on Arrakis?
Paul lifted the paracompass from the pack, returned it, said: “Think of all these special-application Fremen machines. They show unrivaled sophistication. Admit it. The culture that made these things betrays depths no one suspected.”
Hesitating, still worried by the harshness in his voice, Jessica returned to the book, studied an illustrated constellation from the Arrakeen sky: “Muad’Dib: The Mouse,” and noted that the tail pointed north.
Paul stared into the tent’s darkness at the dimly discerned movements of his mother revealed by the manual’s glowtab. Now is the time to carry out my father’s wish, he thought. I must give her his message now while she has time for grief. Grief would inconvenience us later. And he found himself shocked by precise logic.
“Mother,” he said.
“Yes?”
She heard the change in his voice, felt coldness in her entrails at the sound. Never had she heard such harsh control.
“My father is dead,” he said.
She searched within herself for the coupling of fact and fact and fact—the Bene Gesserit way of assessing data—and it came to her: the sensation of terrifying loss.
Jessica nodded, unable to speak.
“My father charged me once,” Paul said, “to give you a message if anything happened to him. He feared you might believe he distrusted you.”
That useless suspicion, she thought.
“He wanted you to know he never suspected you,” Paul said, and explained the deception, adding: “He wanted you to know he always trusted you completely, always loved you and cherished you. He said he would sooner have mistrusted himself and he had but one regret—that he never made you his Duchess.”
She brushed the tears coursing down her cheeks, thought: What a stupid waste of the body’s water! But she knew this thought for what it was—the attempt to retreat from grief into anger. Leto, my Leto, she thought. What terrible things we do to those we love! With a violent motion, she extinguished the little manual’s glowtab.
Sobs shook her.
Paul heard his mother’s grief and felt the emptiness within himself. I have no grief, he thought. Why? Why? He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.
“A time to get and time to lose, ” Jessica thought, quoting to herself from the O.C. Bible. “A time to keep and a time to cast away; a time for love and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace. ”
Paul’s mind had gone on in its chilling precision. He saw the avenues ahead of them on this hostile planet. Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery—as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.
Abruptly, as though he had found a necessary key, Paul’s mind climbed another notch in awareness. He felt himself clinging to this new level, clutching at a precarious hold and peering about. It was as though he existed within a globe with avenues radiating away in all directions … yet this only approximated the sensation.
He remembered once seeing a gauze kerchief blowing in the wind and now he sensed the future as though it twisted across some surface as undulant and impermanent as that of the windblown kerchief.
He saw people.
He felt the heat and cold of uncounted probabilities.