other families. Here was a new slave concubine, then, red-haired like my father, willowy and graceful. She had a dancer’s muscles, and her training obviously had included neuro-enticement. My father looked at her for a long time as she postured unclothed before him. Finally he said: “She is too beautiful. We will save her as a gift.” You have no idea how much consternation this restraint created in the Royal Creche. Subtlety and self-control were, after all, the most deadly threats to us all.
-“In My Father’s House” by the Princess Irulan
PAUL STOOD outside the stilltent in the late afternoon. The crevasse where he had pitched their camp lay in deep shadow. He stared out across the open sand at the distant cliff, wondering if he should waken his mother, who lay asleep in the tent.
Folds upon folds of dunes spread beyond their shelter. Away from the setting sun, the dunes exposed greased shadows so black they were like bits of night.
And the flatness.
His mind searched for something tall in that landscape. But there was no persuading tallness out of heat-addled air and that horizon—no bloom or gently shaken thing to mark the passage of a breeze … only dunes and that distant cliff beneath a sky of burnished silver-blue.
What if there isn’t one of the abandoned testing stations across there? he wondered. What if there are no Fremen, either, and the plants we see are only an accident?
Within the tent, Jessica awakened, turned onto her back and peered sidelong out the transparent end at Paul. He stood with his back to her and something about his stance reminded her of his father. She sensed the well of grief rising within her and turned away.
Presently she adjusted her stillsuit, refreshed herself with water from the tent’s catchpocket, and slipped out to stand and stretch the sleep from her muscles.
Paul spoke without turning: “I find myself enjoying the quiet here.”
How the mind gears itself for its environment, she thought. And she recalled a Bene Gesserit axiom: “The mind can go either direction under stress—towardpositive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training. ”
“It could be a good life here,” Paul said.
She tried to see the desert through his eyes, seeking to encompass all the rigors this planet accepted as commonplace, wondering at the possible futures Paul had glimpsed. One could be alone out here, she thought, without fear of someone behind you, without fear of the hunter.
She stepped past Paul, lifted her binoculars, adjusted the oil lenses and studied the escarpment across from them. Yes, saguaro in the arroyos and other spiny growth … and a matting of low grasses, yellow-green in the shadows.
“I’ll strike camp,” Paul said.
Jessica nodded, walked to the fissure’s mouth where she could get a sweep of the desert, and swung her binoculars to the left. A salt pan glared white there with a blending of dirty tan at its edges—a field of white out here where white was death. But the pan said another thing: water. At some time water had flowed across that glaring white. She lowered her binoculars, adjusted her burnoose, listened for a moment to the sound of Paul’s movements.
The sun dipped lower. Shadows stretched across the salt pan. Lines of wild color spread over the sunset horizon. Color streamed into a toe of darkness testing the sand. Coal-colored shadows spread, and the thick collapse of night blotted the desert.
Stars!
She stared up at them, sensing Paul’s movements as he came up beside her. The desert night focused upward with a feeling of lift toward the stars. The weight of the day receded. There came a brief flurry of breeze across her face.
“The first moon will be up soon,” Paul said. “The pack’s ready. I’ve planted the thumper.”
We could be lost forever in this hellplace, she thought. And no one to know.
The night wind spread sand runnels that grated across her face, bringing the smell of cinnamon: a shower of odors in the dark.
“Smell that,” Paul said.
“I can smell it even through the filter,” she said. “Riches. But will it buy water?” She pointed across the basin. “There are no artificial lights across there.”
“Fremen would be hidden in a sietch behind those rocks,” he said.
A sill of silver pushed above the horizon to their right: the first moon. It lifted into view, the hand